Time dependent biases in consumer multi-attribute judgment

In many product choice occasions, the purchase decision is made some time after product information had been acquired, and not concurrently with it. The time that passes between information acquisition and the judgment may have little effect on the judgment itself if all the attributes presented via advertising and in-store selling activities, are consistently positive and advocate the purchase of the product. However, many purchase decisions are also affected by consumer surveys, reports, expert judgment and alike. Under these conditions attribute values may be inconsistent (i.e. some are positive and others are negative). It was hypothesized that delayed judgments may be positively biased under specified conditions. Two experiments, one conducted in a laboratory setting and the other in a field setting, demonstrated that in immediate judgment, when information was vivid in memory, judgments were biased in the negative direction. The effect was amplified when an inconsistency existed among attribute values. However, in the delayed stage, judgments tended to become positively biased. These effects were limited to delayed judgments that relied on recollection of the original information. When delayed judgments relied on recollection of initial judgments, no time-dependent biases were observed.