When the eyes say buy: visual fixations during hypothetical consumer choice improve prediction of actual purchases

Consumers typically overstate their intentions to purchase products, compared to actual rates of purchases, a pattern called “hypothetical bias”. In laboratory choice experiments, we measure participants’ visual attention using mousetracking or eye-tracking, while they make hypothetical as well as r...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of the Economic Science Association Vol. 5; no. 1; pp. 112 - 122
Main Authors Imai, Taisuke, Kang, Min Jeong, Camerer, Colin F.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York Springer US 01.08.2019
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Behavioral/Experimental Economics
Economic Theory/Quantitative Economics/Mathematical Methods
Economics
Economics and Finance
Game Theory
Microeconomics
Operations Research/Decision Theory
Original Paper
Social and Behav. Sciences
Mousetracking
D12
Eye-tracking
Prediction
Hypothetical bias
D90
C91
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Summary:Consumers typically overstate their intentions to purchase products, compared to actual rates of purchases, a pattern called “hypothetical bias”. In laboratory choice experiments, we measure participants’ visual attention using mousetracking or eye-tracking, while they make hypothetical as well as real purchase decisions. We find that participants spent more time looking both at price and product image prior to making a real “buy” decision than making a real “don’t buy” decision. We demonstrate that including such information about visual attention improves prediction of real buy decisions. This improvement is evident, although small in magnitude, using mousetracking data, but is not evident using eye-tracking data.
ISSN:2199-6776
2199-6784
DOI:10.1007/s40881-019-00071-3