Ayelet Gneezy

Who they are

This page records the public professional record only. Nothing adverse is recorded and no motive is attributed.

The working-paper version of the 2010 study lists her at the Rady School of Management at the University of California, San Diego. Her current position and wider career were not verified for this page.

Key papers

Shu, S. B., & Gneezy, A. (2010), 'Procrastination of Enjoyable Experiences', Journal of Marketing Research, 47(5), 933-944, doi:10.1509/jmkr.47.5.933. Read at the level of the published abstract.

Her wider publication record was not surveyed for this page.

Key ideas

The 2010 paper treats procrastination as something that applies to pleasant experiences as well as to chores. Its central result is that giving people more time to use a gift certificate or card made them slower to redeem and, overall, less likely to redeem at all, which ran against what the participants themselves predicted.

The paper in plain terms

Shu and Gneezy's 2010 paper starts from an observation about ordinary life: people postpone things they expect to enjoy. A museum in one's own city can go unvisited for years because it is always open. The authors test whether models of time discounting predict this, and use two kinds of evidence. In a multicity field study, people with no deadline for visiting desirable landmarks delayed, and a limited window reduced the delay. In experiments with gift certificates and gift cards, recipients with long deadlines redeemed later and, overall, less often.

Time discounting is the way a reward loses pull as the date for it moves away. The consequence the paper draws is the uncomfortable one: extra time can lower the chance that something is used at all. The authors report that this ran counter to participants' own predictions.

Why it matters to loyalty programmes

Gift cards are not loyalty points, and the article on this site that cites the paper says so. What it takes from the study is the logic. A pleasant thing with no date attached can slide, and a closing date pulls it forward. A balance of points that never lapses has no date, which makes the paper a reasonable place to look for an explanation of why balances sit unspent, though not a test of it.

What this page does not know

Only the abstract of the published paper was read. The sample sizes and redemption percentages were not reached, so they are not given. Her wider publication record was not surveyed, and no claim is made here about work outside this paper.

Where the paper sits among the other studies

The article that cites the paper uses it as one of four, and as the only one about timing. Stourm and colleagues modelled why customers hold points unspent in one retailer's linear programme. Hsee and colleagues showed students judging a token on its own scale. Dorotic and colleagues followed redemptions in a Dutch coalition programme. The 2010 paper asks something none of those do: whether the length of the window to use a reward changes whether it is used.

Its answer, for gift certificates and gift cards, was that long deadlines led to later redemption and lower redemption overall. That is the one result among the four that points to a design lever, the deadline, and it is also the one furthest from a loyalty balance, since a gift card is a fixed sum given once and a points balance grows with every purchase. The article says as much, and this page repeats it.

What would settle the question

A direct test would put comparable members through a programme whose points lapse and one whose points do not, and compare redemption and later purchasing. No study read for this site did that, and the Dorotic paper's abstract advises against expiry for a different reason, the effect on purchasing. Two outcomes are in play, redemption and buying, and the evidence read here does not yet show how they trade off.

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