ADVANCING VERSUS DELAYING PAYMENTS AND CONSUMER TIME ORIENTATION - A PERSONAL SELLING EXPERIMENT

The authors propose that an individual's capacity to plan and delay co nsumer decisions may impact purchases within personal selling situatio ns. An experiment was conducted to investigate the effects of postponi ng or expediting a payment for a car on pourchase intentions. A scale, developed to categorize future- and present-time oriented individuals , was employed as a moderating variable. The results indicate that a p resent-time oriented person tends to prefer delayed payments over imme diate payments. In contrast, a future-time oriented person is more lik ely to prefer immediate payments than a present-time oriented person. The results are discussed in relation to applications for developing a daptive selling strategies. (C) 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.