Anticipatory Asymmetry

Anticipatory Asymmetry

Reviewed by Faisal Zaidi

Net anticipatory utility is strongly negative for bad events and only weakly positive for good ones. The reason is arithmetic rather than mysterious: waiting for something good gives you the pleasure of imagining it minus the discomfort of not yet having it, while waiting for something bad gives you the discomfort of imagining it plus the discomfort of waiting. Impatience subtracts from savouring and adds to dread. That lopsidedness is the whole point, and it is what any argument about the pleasure of waiting has to answer first.

What it is

David Hardisty and Elke Weber's 2020 paper in the Journal of Consumer Psychology reports three studies plus twelve supplemental ones, including a pair of field studies using online advertisements for retirement planning. Anticipatory feelings pushed against the conventional discounting prediction, and did so differently by valence: for negative events anticipatory utility was strongly negative, reducing the desire to delay, while for positive events it was weakly positive and therefore did little to reduce the desire to expedite. The consequence is a lopsided set of time preferences. People want badly to get bad things over with, and anticipation does comparatively little to slow their wish to bring good things forward.

In effect

It reframes the famous illustration. Loewenstein's film-star kiss, peaking at three days, is the exception rather than the shape of the field: once impatience is netted off, savouring is weak, while dread is strong and survives netting. So a piece arguing that the wait is the best part of a purchase is arguing for the romantic case against the measured one, and the honest answer is that the asymmetry predicts the opposite for most goods. A later survey-based estimate of individual differences by Chris Dawson and Samuel Johnson points the same way, finding that the displeasure of anticipating future losses outweighs the pleasure of anticipating equal gains, and that people whose asymmetry is stronger are more risk-avoidant and more impatient.

What it does not say

It does not come with magnitudes anyone can check. The sample sizes, the twelve supplemental studies and the advertising platform in the 2020 paper are not available to us, so the direction of the asymmetry is what this page carries and not its size. The corroborating survey work is correlational, and its own authors describe their evidence as suggestive, so it supports direction rather than magnitude too. It is also not loss aversion: that is an asymmetry about outcomes and this is an asymmetry about waiting, with different owners and different evidence, and merging them would be a mistake even though both come out lopsided in the same direction.

Sources

  1. Hardisty, D. J., & Weber, E. U. (2020). "Impatience and Savoring vs. Dread: Asymmetries in Anticipation Explain Consumer Time Preferences for Positive vs. Negative Events." Journal of Consumer Psychology, 30(4), 598-613. Abstract read in full; Hardisty first author. Sample sizes, the twelve supplemental studies and the advertising platform not available.
  2. Dawson, C., & Johnson, S. G. B. (2026). "Asymmetric Anticipatory Emotions and Economic Preferences: Dread, Savoring, Risk, and Time." Cognitive Science, 50(1), e70160. Open access, abstract read in full; Dawson first author. Correlational and survey-based; the authors describe their own evidence as suggestive.
  3. Loewenstein, G. (1987). "Anticipation and the Valuation of Delayed Consumption." The Economic Journal, 97(387), 666-684. Full text read. The source of the illustration this page reframes.