This is why we never delay buying expensive goods - Hindustan Times
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This is why we never delay buying expensive goods

IANS | By, New York
May 24, 2016 06:00 PM IST

Have you ever wondered why you never delay the purchase of costly goods? According to a new study, we tend to buy expensive things to avoid the regret we may have later if they become unavailable.

Have you ever wondered why you never delay the purchase of costly goods? According to a new study, we tend to buy expensive things to avoid the regret we may have later if they become unavailable.

According to a new study, we tend to buy expensive things to avoid the regret we may have later if they become unavailable.(Shutterstock)
According to a new study, we tend to buy expensive things to avoid the regret we may have later if they become unavailable.(Shutterstock)

Consider someone finds a jacket in a store but due to its price, he thinks whether he should wait and hope it goes on sale in the future.

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Then again, the jacket might go out of stock before that happens and he might never acquire it at all, regretting the decision.

So the consumer pays more to avoid that feeling of regret.

Read: E-shopping is a favourite pastime of Indians and women are driving it

According to the team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), not only do consumers tend to buy goods partly to avoid that feeling, but some retailers fail to notice this behavioural quirk and thus miss an opportunity to increase their revenues.

“The high-value customers will still buy the product,” said Karen Zheng, co-author of the study published in the journal Management Science.

“They want to [avoid] this feeling of regret, which would occur if they wait now and then cannot get it in the future,” added Zheng, who is also an assistant professor of operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Read: Are Indians e-shopaholics? 60% of our home budget is spent online

According to the research results, for such items if retailers fail to recognise consumers’ emotions, they could stock insufficient amounts of merchandise and may forgo up to 14 percent of consumer demand.

Indeed, some retailers could have profits 7 to 10 percent higher if they pursued different pricing strategies.

That is, generally higher prices with occasional sales mixed in will yield more revenue than consistently low prices, at least for fashionable goods.

In the paper, the scholars used existing empirical research from behavioural economics to build a new model of consumer decision making.

The researchers wrote that “branded fashion items tend to induce strong stockout regret but weak high-price regret”.

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