Does the "last-name effect" affect how you shop?
Looking to sell those double-booked tickets in a hurry? Why not try the Zoltan family?
According to a new study, your last name is a good indicator of how quckly you're likely to buy stuff. What could possibly explain this phenomenon, which the study authors dubbed "the last-name effect"?
Researcher Kurt A. Carlson believes this habit is linked to childhood and constant alphabetizing during school. Children with late-letter last names tended to wait longer for things, and therefore compensate later in life, he believes.
“For years, simply because of your name, you've received inequitable treatment,” says Carlson, an assistant professor at Georgetown's McDonough School of Business. “So when you get to exercise control, you seize on opportunity. It's a coping strategy, and over time it becomes a natural way to respond.”
The last-name effect is especially important to retailers and salespeople because customer names are easy for marketers to obtain and because there are many times in which the decision is not whether to buy, but when to buy.
But is it inequality, or just impatience? Carlson carried out a series of experiments to test his hypothesis and found a person named Anthony would wait 25 per cent longer than a person named Zoltan to buy a hot-ticket item.
In one experiment, the research team randomly emailed participants from social networking sites offering them a chance to win four tickets to a championship basketball game.
Using email, the researchers found that people with last names starting with R-Z responded five minutes faster than those starting with A-I.
Make sense to you? Were you made to wait as kid? Are you inpulsive when it comes to how and what you buy?
By Gordon Powers, MSN Money
Posted by: SP | Nov 7, 2021 8:18:42 PM
Not sure if there is enough information here to determine if this study even had any merits at all. BUT assuming that this study is completely without confounding variables then it is clear that the fault lays with Teachers. I'll leave it in your capable hands to let the teachers unions know that they are the one's at fault for harming little Zuckerberg & Zoolander's future.
Posted by: Matt | Nov 8, 2021 9:16:21 AM
Sounds like a whole lot of coincidence rather than scientific fact. Many people use aliases so I'm not sure how valid the information collected is anyway. So many other factors can determine impulsive spending such as finances, access to retail, even birth order.. You could just as easily conclude that people with last names from R-Z are more financially well off to make such purchases. Ludicrous? Well of course. And so is this study.