Leigh McAlister

Who they are

The 1994 Journal of Marketing Research article in which she is co-author lists her as a professor of marketing at the University of Texas at Austin. The same article lists Inman as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's business school. This page records nothing about her beyond the cited work.

The 1994 paper asked whether a coupon's expiration date changes shopper behaviour. The traditional view was that redemptions peak just after a coupon is distributed and then decline steadily. Inman and McAlister used regret theory to predict a second peak just before expiry. They extended an existing coupon redemption model to include an expiration effect, and fitted it to weekly Nielsen panel records of spaghetti sauce coupon redemptions in two cities. Their abstract reports results consistent with the prediction.

She is also named on a 1998 Journal of Marketing Research study, with Susan Broniarczyk and Wayne Hoyer, of item reduction and perceived assortment, which this site covers on its pages for Perceived Variety and Assortment Reduction.

What a second peak would mean

The older picture treated a coupon's expiry date as the issuer's way of capping what it owed. On that picture, redemptions peak soon after distribution and then fall steadily, and a date just closes the book. Inman and McAlister proposed that the date also shapes behaviour. Their reasoning came from regret theory: a shopper expects to feel worse about letting a coupon lapse than about using it, so the approach of the date pulls redemptions forward and produces a second burst.

The test used weekly redemption records for spaghetti sauce coupons in two cities, taken from Nielsen consumer panels. They extended an existing coupon redemption model with an expiration effect and fitted both versions, and the abstract reports results consistent with the prediction. The phrase to hold on to is consistent with: the paper's abstract, which is what this page rests on, does not state how large the second burst was.

Limits on reading it across to timers

The deadline in the 1994 data was real, a date printed on a real coupon, and the behaviour was purchasing. No clock was on any screen. The data are more than thirty years old and cover one product category. The result shows a pattern around a true deadline and not the size of any gain to a seller. It does not speak to a timer that resets, which is the case the Radboud experiment and the shopping-site crawl address, and the Countdown Timer article keeps the two apart for that reason.

Her other named work on this site, the 1998 study with Susan Broniarczyk and Wayne Hoyer of item reduction and perceived assortment, concerns a different question, how cutting items from a category changes the perceived range. The two papers share a field and a method, field data from grocery categories, and not a subject.

Key papers

Inman, J. J., & McAlister, L. (1994). "Do Coupon Expiration Dates Affect Consumer Behavior?" Journal of Marketing Research, 31(3), 423-428. doi:10.1177/002224379403100310.

Key ideas

A real deadline can create a second wave of demand: see Expiration Effect. The result concerns coupons with printed expiry dates, in one product category, and the abstract gives no size of gain to a seller. It says nothing about on-screen countdown timers.

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