Suzanne Shu

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 UCLA Anderson School of Management, and notes that the article draws partly on her dissertation. 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 paper extends procrastination from unpleasant tasks to pleasant experiences with immediate benefits, and uses models of time discounting to predict it. People with unlimited time windows delayed visiting desirable landmarks in a multicity study, and procrastination was reduced when the window was constrained.

In experiments with gift certificates and gift cards, long deadlines produced more procrastination and lower redemption overall. The authors report that these results run counter to participants' own predictions and to typical models of impulsive behaviour.

Reading the 2010 paper

The paper asks a simple question that most work on delay had not: do people put off pleasant things? Its answer rests on two kinds of evidence. A multicity field study looked at visits to desirable landmarks, and found that people with no deadline delayed, while a limited window of opportunity reduced the delay. A set of experiments looked at gift certificates and gift cards, and found that recipients with long deadlines redeemed later and, overall, less often than those with short ones.

The authors explain this with models of time discounting, the way a reward loses pull as the date for it moves away. On that logic a pleasant thing with no date attached can slide, because there is always a nearer thing to do. They report that the results ran counter to what participants had predicted and to typical models of impulsive behaviour, which matters for anyone who assumes that giving people more time is a kindness.

How this site uses the paper

The article on why loyalty points sit unspent uses the paper as a deadline test, and says plainly that gift cards are not loyalty points. A balance of points with no expiry date resembles a long deadline in one respect, and the article treats that as a reading across, not a result.

What this page does not know

Only the published abstract was read. The sample sizes and the size of the redemption gap were not reached, so none are given. Her wider publication record was not surveyed, and nothing here should be read as a summary of it.

Where the paper sits among the other studies

The article on why loyalty points sit unspent builds its case from four studies, and the 2010 paper is the one about time. Stourm and colleagues modelled why customers hold points in one retailer's linear programme, Hsee and colleagues showed a token being judged on its own scale in a laboratory choice, and Dorotic and colleagues followed redemptions in a Dutch coalition programme. Shu and Gneezy supply the question of whether an open-ended window is itself part of the problem.

Their outcome is also the narrowest of the four. It is the share of gift certificates and cards redeemed, and how late. The Dorotic abstract concludes that firms wanting to raise purchasing should avoid point expiry and binding redemption thresholds, which is a different outcome measured in a different kind of programme, so the two papers are not in conflict. No study read for this site put the same customers through a lapsing and a non-lapsing points scheme, and this page does not pretend otherwise.

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