The More People Want Something, the Less They'll Like It

Uzma Khan:

The finding: Denying people access to a product will make them desire it more and work harder to get it--but will also make them less likely to keep it.

The study: Uzma Khan and her colleagues Ab Litt and Baba Shiv awarded a gift card to an electronics store to people who completed a word puzzle. Half the recipients earned the prize on their first try; half had tried to win it before but failed. Before receiving a card, all were asked how much they'd pay to obtain it. People who'd previously been denied the prize were willing to pay much more but then were more likely to trade their card away when offered the chance to exchange it for a different card.

The challenge: Is the assumption that we want what we like and we like what we want flawed? When a product is hard to obtain, do we lust after it more but like it less once we get it? Professor Khan, defend your research.

Khan: This jilting effect is big. People who initially failed to win a gift card said they'd pay 43% more to get one than people who hadn't, but only 22% of the initially "jilted" group decided to keep the card instead of trading it. In the group that wasn't previously denied access, 57% of the people--nearly three times as many--kept the card. And in a follow-up experiment, the effect transferred to the company's other products. We told half the subjects that they could win Guess sunglasses, contingent on supplies. They were later told we had run out of glasses. In a product evaluation, those people then rated Guess watches lower and Calvin Klein watches higher than the other half of the subjects, who hadn't expected to win glasses and didn't experience the stock-out. Oddly, when we asked the people who'd been denied the glasses which watch they'd like to receive, they chose the Guess watches more often than the Calvin Klein ones.