Checking Out Temptation: A Natural Experiment with Purchases at the Grocery Register
A lengthy literature in economics and psychology indicates that prolonged exposure to a tempting
stimulus can lead people to “succumb” to that temptation. Here we develop a model of decision
under temptation, and test its predictions using a natural experiment. We take advantage of
exogenous variations in the amount of time over 2,800 individual consumers spent exposed to
tempting items while waiting in grocery store checkout lines. Because we passively observe these
consumers’ naturally occurring purchase decisions, our approach avoids confounds that can arise
in designed experiments on temptation and self-control. Our main finding is that time spent in line
economically and statistically significantly increases the probability that a consumer purchases a
tempting item. Our results provide novel quantitative content to the rapidly expanding literature
on decisions under temptation.
First version: August 2004
Last revised: August 20, 2021