Mental Accounting of Time: How Anticipated Waiting Costs and Future Resources Shape Current Consumer Decisions

In essay 1, co-authored with Oleg Urminsky, I examine how consumers organize and anticipate waiting when multiple outcomes are delayed in parallel. Classic intertemporal models predict that, holding outcomes constant, consumers should always prefer earlier receipt of benefits, regardless of the timing of other outcomes. In contrast, this paper proposes that consumers are sensitive to the structure of waiting episodes and may be willing to accept longer total delays when doing so simplifies the anticipated waiting experience. Specifically, it introduces the synchronization effect: consumers are more willing to delay an earlier benefit when doing so allows it to arrive on the same future date as another benefit, even when synchronization offers no instrumental advantages such as convenience or reduced effort. Across multiple experimental contexts, including product delivery and monetary payments, introducing a synchronized option increases willingness to wait. Importantly, this reflects an attenuation of impatience rather than a reversal: consumers remain generally impatient but become more tolerant of delay when waiting periods can be consolidated. The central mechanism is single-event construal. When outcomes arrive on the same date, consumers are more likely to represent waiting as a single unified episode rather than multiple distinct waits, reducing the anticipated cognitive burden of monitoring and mentally tracking future events. Process evidence shows that synchronized delivery increases perceptions of "waiting once rather than twice," which mediates willingness to accept longer delays, and that the effect weakens when this unified construal is disrupted. By reframing waiting as an actively managed psychological experience rather than a passive temporal cost, this paper extends intertemporal choice theory to contexts involving multiple parallel delays and reveals a novel pathway through which anticipation shapes present behavior. In essay 2, co-authored with Abigail Sussman, I shift focus from waiting to future financial resources, examining how consumers anticipate and mentally account for money that will become available over time. While traditional economic models treat future income as fungible and fully integrated into lifetime wealth, behavioral research shows that consumers often earmark funds into distinct mental accounts, constraining spending and shaping financial decisions. However, existing work has largely focused on current or past resources, leaving open how consumers mentally represent future resources when making present-day choices. This paper proposes that consumers organize future resources into temporally defined mental budgets rather than a single integrated pool. As a result, present decisions are guided not only by objective financial constraints but also by subjective perceptions of future slack or scarcity. Across a series of studies, the paper demonstrates that anticipating future resources can systematically loosen or tighten present financial behavior, even when objective wealth remains unchanged. Consumers are more willing to spend, commit, or absorb costs when future resources are framed as psychologically available and integrated, but remain conservative when those same resources are mentally partitioned or earmarked for other purposes. These findings reveal a forward-looking form of mental accounting in which consumers regulate present behavior by managing expectations about future financial states.