I'll have the ice cream soon and the vegetables later

About this book

How do decisions made for tomorrow or two days in advance differ from decisions made for several days in the future? Most economic models predict that decisions do not systematically differ on such short timescales. We use a novel panel data from an online grocer to conduct analyses suggesting that people are decreasingly impatient the further in the future their choices will take effect. In general, as the delay between order completion and delivery increases, we find that the same customers spend less, order a higher percentage of "should" items (e.g., vegetables), and order a lower percentage of "want" items (e.g., ice cream). However, orders placed for delivery tomorrow versus two days in the future do not show this want/should pattern, and we briefly discuss survey results suggesting a potential explanation for the nonlinearity in customers' apparent decreasing impatience.