The Influence of Scheduling Style on Assortment Size

IntroductionConsumers often decide to shop in a store based on the assortment of products available in the store. For example, consumers may decide between shopping at a retailer with a smaller assortment of products vs. a retailer with a larger assortment of products. Recent research has investigated different factors that influence consumers' preference for assortment size (Chernev, 2006; Goodman and Malkoc, 2012; Huffman and Kahn, 1998). However, research has not considered whether this preference is dependent on how consumers plan their daily activities. Recent research (Sellier and Avnet, 2014) shows that consumers adopt two scheduling styles to plan their daily activities: clock-time and event-time. Consumers who adopt clock-time use an external clock to help them navigate through their daily activities. They divide time into measurable units and use the external clock to figure out when activities begin and end (Levine, 1997). For example, consumers may plan to work from 9 to 12 pm, have lunch from 12pm to 1pm and finish their work from 1pm to 5pm. On the other hand, consumers who adopt event-time use their internal sense to help them navigate through their daily activities. They plan their activities relative to each other, and transition from one activity to the other when they think that the previous activity has been completed. For example, consumers may plan on working until they decide to or until they are hungry for lunch, and resume work once lunch is over, working until they decide they have done enough work for the day. In this article, we examine how the different scheduling style consumers adopt for their daily activities influence their assortment size preferences. Since consumers often schedule their lives on a daily basis to make the most of their limited time, understanding the role of scheduling styles on consumer decisions is an important area to explore for marketing researchers. Therefore, explicating how scheduling style influences assortment size decisions helps us advance our understanding of the impact of scheduling style on consumer decisions.Across two experiments, we show that consumers' scheduling styles influences their preference of assortment sizes. Specifically, consumers who use event-time scheduling prefer large assortments whereas consumers who use clock-time scheduling prefer smaller assortments. Furthermore, the influence of scheduling style on preference of assortment size is mediated by desirability-feasibility considerations. Specifically, event-time influences consumers to focus on desirability considerations, which lead them to prefer larger assortment size while shopping. On the other hand, clock-time influences consumers to focus on feasibility considerations, which lead them to prefer smaller assortment size while shopping.The rest of the article is organized as follows. First, we review the literature on product assortments and scheduling style. Second, we propose hypotheses that highlight the impact of scheduling style on product assortment. Third, we present two experiments that test our hypotheses and provide evidence for the underlying process. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and practical implications.Literature reviewAssortment sizeResearch in assortment size shows that consumers first choose a product assortment such as which store to visit and then decides on which product to buy (Broniarczyk, 2008; Chernev, 2006; Goodman and Malkoc, 2012). In this research, we focus on the choice of assortment, particularly the size of the assortments. Recent research has identified different factors that influence consumers' preference for assortment sizes. For example, researchers show consumers prefer to shop in retail stores with larger assortment size (Redden and Hoch, 2009) because large assortments help consumers find the product they like (Chernev, 2003), offer flexibility in making choices (Ratner, Kahn, and Kahnemann, 1999), and decreases preference uncertainty (Lehmann, 1991). …