Why consumers quit using skill-based products
Rice, CMU, BYU research teams find consumers overpredict ability, then underpredict learning curve

BY JESSICA STARK
Rice News staff

Consumers often quit using products that could benefit them because they experience a short period of pessimism during their initial encounter with skill-based products as varied as knitting needles and mobile devices, according to a new manuscript in the Journal of Consumer Research. The findings counter the conventional wisdom and previous research that says consumers generally grow fonder of products the more often they use them.

Ajay Kalra, professor

	AJAY KALRA

of marketing in Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business, is part of a collaborative research team that found consumers are overconfident in their ability to learn to use skill-based products before trying them out. However, after experiencing the product, they become underconfident in their ability to use it and quit, no matter the promised benefit of the product or activity.

Kalra and his co-authors — George Loewenstein, professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, and Darron Billeter, assistant professor of marketing business management at Brigham Young University — studied how people approach new tasks that wouldn’t take that long to learn, such as typing on a keyboard with an unfamiliar layout, tracing lines while only looking at a mirror and folding T-shirts in a different way.

The subjects were given verbal instructions on how to perform the task and asked to predict how rapidly they would be able to do it. Next, they were given a short amount of experience with the task. They overpredicted their performance ability with the new task; they initially had asserted they could fold T-shirts, learn keystrokes and trace lines much faster than they actually could.

However, after their short experience with the tasks, the people underpredicted their abilities. Not only were they overly pessimistic about completing the task in the short term, but they were overly pessimistic about their ability to improve over time. They underestimated their own learning curves.

After each round of the task, subjects were asked to make new predictions of how successful they would be in subsequent rounds. Only after four rounds of underpredicting their own performance did they start to “get it” and correctly predict their own improvement.

“Much of parenting is about teaching children that persistence pays off — that tasks which initially seem difficult become easier with practice,” Kalra and his co-authors said. “The results of these studies suggest that, despite whatever lessons our parents might have sought to teach us, most of us have not fully learned the lesson.”

The consequences of the over- and underprediction can be seen in consumer behavior. The subjects were asked how much they would pay for a new keyboard that they would have to learn how to use. After using the keyboard for a few minutes, they were asked again how much they would pay. They were not willing to pay as much as they were initially.