和訳をお願いします
This study was designed to discern whether reluctance to
waste, perceived progress, or both explanations jointly are
responsible for observed endowed progress effects.
Method
Subjects. Participants were 146 undergraduate business
students at a major West Coast university who participated
in this along with several other studies for course credit.
Stimuli and Design. The design was a 2 (progress: onethird
or one-sixth complete)#2 (endowment value: $12.50
or $30.00) between-subjects, full-factorial design with a separate
control condition. To disentangle the competing explanations
of wasted investment versus perceived progress,
our design specifies a dollar value for the endowed progress.
Participants in this study completed a scenario-based,
paper-and-pencil study. The study explained that a popular
restaurant on campus was considering instituting a frequent
buyer program. This study captures the essential decision
making that likely occurs when consumers are confronted
with enrolling in a frequency program, whether it requires
signing up or just keeping the loyalty card in one’s wallet.
In the control surveys, customers had to purchases 10
lunches in order to earn a free lunch of identical value.
Customers had not yet made any purchases, such that there
was no progress toward their goal, real or perceived. There
were four such scenarios that differed only in the required
cost of each purchase ($2.50, $6.00, $6.25, or $15.00). These
studies provided a baseline measure. In the four scenarios
that comprised the test conditions or cells, the amount of
purchases required, the size of the endowment, and the cost
of each purchase were each varied in order to manipulate
perceived progress and endowment value simultaneously.
In two scenarios, participants were told that because they
were first-time patrons they would receive two of 12 credits
toward the reward (each credit worth the equivalent of one
purchase in dollars), and, in the other two scenarios, they
were told they would receive five of 15 credits, such that
they were endowed with progress of one-sixth or one-third,
respectively. These endowments manipulate the fraction
of the task yet to complete; in the former, five-sixths must
still be completed, and in the latter, only four-sixths remain.
The dollar amount of a purchase varied and was crossed
such that the total dollar value of the endowment was either
$12.50 or $30.00 (5#$2.50 p 2#$6.25 p $12.50,
5#$6.00 p 2#$15.00 p $30.00). See table 1 for a detailed
summary of the design. Respondents were then asked
how likely they would be to register for the program, how
attractive they thought the program would be to diners, and
how likely they would be to earn the reward on a nine-point
scale. These measures served as the dependent variable.
