۱- Literature review

۲- Overview of studies

۳- Study 1

۴- Study 2

۵- General discusssion

References

Abstract

The authors conduct two studies to examine how time urgency affects consumer responses to mobile reward apps. For participants who have made high progress toward reaching goals, short expiration dates (“collect 10 stamps for a free coffee by tomorrow”) cause to-go framing (”۲ more stamps to go”) to be more effective than to-date framing (”۸ stamps collected so far”), but for participants who have a long way to go before reaching the goal, short expiration dates cause to-date framing to be more effective than to-go framing. However, a long expiration date produced no difference between to-go and to-date framings, under both high and low progress.

Limitations and directions for future research

Our research has some limitations that warrant future research. First, we conducted both studies in a controlled lab setting to maximize control over extraneous factors. Replications in a field setting would increase the robustness of our observations (Rossi et al., 2015). Second, although college student samples are a suitable population for using shopping mobile apps and testing theory (Baek and Yoo, 2018), they might limit the generalizability of our results. Previous findings suggest that the relationship between chronological age and time constraints becomes more salient as individuals age (Strough et al., 2016). An investigation using a non-student adult sample might provide valuable insights into the interplay between goal progress framing and time urgency. Future research is also needed to examine the current research across more representative samples of different mobile app categories (Kim and Baek, 2018; Kim et al., 2016). Finally, as previous findings indicate that attitude and behavioral intention both predict future behavior (Ajzen, 1991), we used three different dependent measures across the two studies: purchase intention (Study 1), attitude toward the mobile reward app (Study 2), and attitude toward the brand (Study 2). These constructs are widely used as dependent variables in consumer-retailing research (e.g., Baek et al., 2015; Bellman et al., 2011; Han et al., 2019; Yim et al., 2018; Yoon et al., 2016), yet people often express attitudes that are inconsistent with their behaviors (Hidalgo-Baz et al., 2017). Although we observed convergence in the three measures, scholars should consider simultaneously examining all three variables in a single study.