Abstract
<p>Managers, marketers, and policymakers increasingly shape decisions by arranging when and how option attributes are presented, yet we lack a process-level account of why such interventions work. Do people apply well-defined preferences when making value-based decisions, or do they construct preferences on the spot in ways that depend on how information is acquired and evaluated over the course of a decision? Resolving this question is central to understanding and influencing decisions in households, organizations, and markets. Here, we investigate how the temporal dynamics of the choice process shape consumption decisions in two studies using response times and time manipulations. In each study, participants made binary choices between snack foods with and without time constraints. Using regression analysis and drift-diffusion modeling, we found that moving from time pressure to free response to time delay increases the importance of pleasure and decreases the importance of nutrition for pleasure-seeking participants, whereas the pattern reverses for nutrition-seeking participants. These results indicate that people preferentially process either pleasure or nutrition early in the choice process (relative to the other attribute) and that the time afforded by a choice environment systematically reweights these attributes. Because these intra-decisional dynamics are governed by when attributes enter processing, they identify a concrete lever – the ordering, salience, and timing of attribute information – through which managers and policymakers can steer consumption and other economic decisions.</p>