Keep Waiting Periods From Passing a Round Number

1:58 PM feels sooner than 2:01 PM

Person choosing a more expensive uberX ride that arrives at 1:58pm. The cheaper uber pool ride arrives at 2:01pm

Overview

Researchers analyzed 1.8 million Uber rides, and they found that customers prefer UberX (the more expensive solo ride) if it arrives within the same hour (e.g., 1:58pm).

Crossing a time bracket (e.g., 2:01pm) feels longer, even if the difference is trivial (Donnelly, Compiani, & Evers, 2022).

This effect resembles “charm pricing” in which $4.99 feels cheaper than $5.00. Your brain overemphasizes the unit difference.

A charm price like $4.99, compared to a round price like $5.00, occurs with time intervals. 4:59pm feels sooner than 5:00pm

Much like a one-cent difference, a one-minute difference can be deceptively powerful.

In additional studies, those researchers confirmed that events seem longer when they span more time boundaries:

7:00pm to 9:30pm feels shorter than 7:30pm to 10:00pm, despite being the same length

Some actionable techniques:

1. Shipping

Suppose that today is August 23. If you buy something online, you might upgrade to expedited shipping so that your product arrives within August.

2. Store Hours

Perhaps you should extend store hours from 8:30pm to 9:00pm. This extra 30 minutes will feel like 60 minutes because it reaches a new time bracket.

3. Length of Benefits

Billing cycles align with time periods – for example, access to customer support might end on the final day of a month (e.g., August 31). Why not shift this timeline? Extending this benefit by a single day (e.g., September 1) could drastically raise the perceived value. It feels like an extra month.

4. See Results By

When will customers receive benefits? Frame this value within the current time bracket (e.g., end of the [month, quarter, year]).

Always frame the right category of time:

categories are quite flexible…the description “take off in the morning, be in your hotel before lunch” makes lunch a salient boundary and thus likely minimizes the difference between a 10:58 and 11:02 arrival. (Donnelly, Compiani, & Evers, 2022, p. 837)

5. Meetings

Scheduling a 45-min meeting?

Recipients will prefer 1:00pm to 1:45pm (vs. 1:30pm to 2:15pm).

However, meetings seem more productive when they span more time brackets. Workers in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk estimated they could accomplish more tasks during these seemingly larger time windows.

Participants estimated they could complete more tasks between 10:25am and 2:10pm, compared to 10:05am to 1:50pm, even though the absolute time difference was the same.

6. Life Decisions

Would a 17-year old be tempted to pursue a 2-year degree that finishes in their teens? Would an 18-year-old be less intimidated by a 4-year degree because both options (2-year vs. 4-year) would end in their twenties?

Summary

Choose the right time brackets for events: Minimize brackets for negative events (e.g., layovers), but maximize them for positive events (e.g., lunch break).

Donnelly, K., Compiani, G., & Evers, E. R. (2022). Time periods feel longer when they span more category boundaries: Evidence from the lab and the field. Journal of Marketing Research, 59(4), 821-839.