Transaction Decoupling
The loosening of the link between a payment and the benefits it bought, which bundled prices can produce.
What it is
Dilip Soman and John Gourville proposed and tested it in 2001, building on research on sunk costs. On this site it is read alongside Sunk Cost Fallacy and Mental Accounting.
In effect
In two laboratory studies, people with a bundled four-day ski pass were less likely to ski on the last day than people with four separate day tickets, and in a field study holders of multi-performance theatre tickets were more likely to miss a given show than holders of single tickets.
What it does not say
It is not the same thing as Sunk Cost Fallacy, which sits close to it on this site but describes a different part of how people decide. It also does not say that the finding reaches every product, buyer or setting; where this page goes beyond the cited research, the step is an inference and is labelled as one.
Sources
- Dilip Soman is the author of the 2001 work on whether sunk costs of time behave like sunk costs of money, which is the question the whole I have already watched ten hours argument depends on.
- Marketing professor at Harvard Business School.