Do Coupon Expiration Dates Affect Consumer Behavior?
J. Jeffrey Inman and Leigh McAlister note that coupon issuers use expiration dates to limit how long they are financially liable for an offer, and that the conventional expectation is a peak in redemptions just after a coupon is dropped followed by a steady decline. Drawing on regret theory, they predict a second burst of redemptions shortly before the expiry date. To test it they extend an existing model of coupon redemption with a term for expiration effects and fit both models to weekly redemption data for spaghetti sauce, taken from Nielsen panels in two cities. The results support the prediction. The abstract closes by noting implications for practitioners and researchers, and it reports one product category in two cities.
J. Jeffrey Inman and Leigh McAlister note that coupon issuers use expiration dates to limit how long they are financially liable for an offer, and that the conventional expectation is a peak in redemptions just after a coupon is dropped followed by a steady decline. Drawing on regret theory, they predict a second burst of redemptions shortly before the expiry date. To test it they extend an existing model of coupon redemption with a term for expiration effects and fit both models to weekly redemption data for spaghetti sauce, taken from Nielsen panels in two cities. The results support the prediction. The abstract closes by noting implications for practitioners and researchers, and it reports one product category in two cities.
Written from the openAlex abstract record read 2026-10-22.
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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