The Engineering of Consumer Experiences Under Affect Assimilation and Quality Contrast

Consumer experiences are inherently dynamic. When engaging in a sequence of activities, consumers are influenced by past experiences in two ways: negatively by their objective quality, through quality contrast; and positively by their subjective appreciation of them, through affect assimilation. How should experience curators sequence activities to maximize consumer satisfaction in the presence of such intertemporal effects? We formulate an experience curator’s problem as a dynamic optimization program. We show that, because of affect assimilation, the best activity may be scheduled at the beginning or in the middle of an experience, in contrast to the common peak-end rule—this provides a rationale for the saying that “first impressions matter.” Under uncertainty, it may be valuable to save the best activity as a “wild card” to recover from bad outcomes. We calibrate our model to four distinct experiential contexts (namely, watching movies, reading books, visiting touristic attractions, and eating out) and consistently find the presence of both quality contrast and affect assimilation. Through a counterfactual study in the context of touristic tours, we show that experience curators may significantly benefit from offering different fixed sequences to different types of consumers, but they tend to gain little from dynamically adjusting them.

This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, operations management.

Funding: This work was supported by the Agencia Estatal de Investigación [Grant PID2020-116135GB-I00 MCIN/AEI/10.13039/50110001].

Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.02150.