Payment depreciation: The behavioral effects of temporally separating payments from consumption
Gourville and Soman, Journal of Consumer Research 25(2), 1998, 160-174. When costs precede benefits (prepayment), mental accounting can give sunk costs weight; the authors predicted the sunk-cost pull weakens as time passes (payment depreciation) and found evidence across several experiments in a variety of transactions. No figures in the abstract.
Gourville and Soman, Journal of Consumer Research 25(2), 1998, 160-174. When costs precede benefits (prepayment), mental accounting can give sunk costs weight; the authors predicted the sunk-cost pull weakens as time passes (payment depreciation) and found evidence across several experiments in a variety of transactions. No figures in the abstract.
Written from the abstract (OpenAlex), 2026-11-07.
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Recorded when this source was checked, figures included, with page references and quotation marks removed.
Gourville, J. T., & Soman, D. (1998). Payment depreciation: The behavioral effects of temporally separating payments from consumption. Journal of Consumer Research, 25(2), 160-174. doi:10.1086/209533 https://doi.org/10.1086/209533