UC San Diego

This dissertation comprises two papers that examine the psychological mechanisms underlying consumer decision making. In the first paper, I investigate consumers’ behavior surrounding a novel payment method, buy now, pay later (BNPL), and show that paying with BNPL increases consumers’ purchase of products above their usual (“ordinary-for-self”) price, and that consumers also prefer to use BNPL when paying for purchases above their usual price. I find that this is due, in part, to the way BNPL is able to transform the mental categorization of purchases above one’s usual price in a product category into prices that are more acceptable to one’s financial self-control. In the second paper, I examine buyers’ requests for revisions of final deliverables on a large online freelance platform, and find that buyers are more likely to request platform-vetted high-quality female sellers revise their final deliverables than equivalent male sellers. I discuss and test for alternative explanations for this finding, and propose that this pattern emerges because people have overly high expectations of high-achieving women but not men, driven by the assumption that successful women have advanced despite repeatedly being held to higher standards.