Time-poor consumers: effects on happiness, relationships, and behaviors

• Autores: Maria Giulia Trupia
• Directores de la Tesis: Isabelle Engeler (dir. tes.), Stefan Stremersch (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universidad de Navarra ( España ) en 2022
• Idioma: inglés
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Íñigo Gallo (presid.), Johannes Müller Trede (secret.), Ioannis Evangelidis (voc.), Zachary Estes (voc.), Jordi Quoidbach (voc.)
• Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Ciencias de la Dirección por la Universidad de Navarra
• Materias:
  • Ciencias económicas
    • Organización y dirección de empresas
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• Resumen

  • From polls to social media or conversations with their friendspeople increasingly report that they are busy and do not have enough time to do all the things they want to do. Prior research has suggested that this feeling has consequences on peoples well-being and behaviors. However, there are many unanswered questions: How can time poverty actually be defined and measured? What are the antecedents and relevant consequences of time poverty on peoples lives? In this dissertation, I focus on the experience of being time poor and its implications on interpersonal relationships, wellbeing, and behaviors including consumption behaviors. In Chapter 1, I examine one potential driver of time poverty: People systematically underappreciate unexpected time windfalls. I find that people are numb to time windfalls: Whereas finishing a task later than planned strongly decreases happiness, finishing it earlier by the same amount does not substantially increase happiness. Importantly, this numbness to windfalls is specific to timemonetary savings increase happiness significantly more than time savings. I also uncover one reason for this low appreciation of time windfalls: When they happen, people seem to fail to reinvest thema shortcoming people are unaware of. In Chapter 2, I investigate the interpersonal effects of sharing the experience of time poverty with others. I identify a miscalibration between what people intend to communicate when telling others that they are busy and what others hear: Receivers perceive that expressers feel greater self-importance than they actually do. This misperception proves to be interpersonally disconnecting, which negatively affects liking. Importantly, I find a remedy to effectively communicate this experience in a way that does not inadvertently disconnect us from others: Emphasizing the emotional strain of busyness (rather than disclosing the fact of having a lot to do) reduces perceptions of self-importance, improves expressers liking and perceived warmth, without making the expresser appear less competent. Finally, in Chapter 3, I validate a scale of time poverty and I examine its nomological network (e.g., willingness to volunteer, self-efficacy). I also document the scales ability to correlate with relevant consumer behaviors and technology usage (e.g., outsourcing of tasks, social media and smartphone usage). Taken together, the findings of my dissertation advance our understanding of the psychology of timeand especially of the antecedents and consequences of time poverty. They show that time poverty can stem from people not making sufficient use of time windfalls (Chapter 1) and that time poverty can lead to costly interpersonal misperceptions (Chapter 2) and relevant downstream consequences on consumers behavior like outsourcing of tasks, and social media and smartphone usage (Chapter 3).