Ran Kivetz

Who they are

Kivetz studies consumer motivation and reward programmes. The 2006 paper, written with Oleg Urminsky and Yuhuang Zheng, is the work this site draws on.

This page records only what the papers and their published records state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.

Key papers

The goal-gradient hypothesis resurrected: purchase acceleration, illusionary goal progress, and customer retention (2006), with Urminsky and Zheng. In a café reward programme, customers bought coffee more often as they approached a free one. Across nearly a thousand completed cards, the time between purchases shrank by about a fifth. In an experiment with 108 customers, those given a 12-stamp card with 2 bonus stamps completed their 10 required purchases in 12.7 days on average, against 15.6 days for customers with a plain 10-stamp card. The paper also reported a music-rating site where members rated songs faster as they neared a reward, and found that customers who sped up more on their first card were likelier to earn a second reward and came back sooner. After a reward was earned, the purchase rate reset.

Key ideas

The central idea is the goal gradient: motivation depends on perceived distance to the goal, so the same remaining effort feels different depending on how far along a person believes they are. The bonus-stamp experiment showed that "illusionary" progress, stamps given rather than earned, also speeds people up.

The finding complements Joseph Nunes and Xavier Drèze's 2006 car wash study of the endowed progress effect. Together they explain why a partly filled card or progress bar can change how hard people work towards a reward, and the reset after a reward is a reminder that the effect does not carry over automatically to the next goal.

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