How Much Will I Spend? Factors Affecting Consumers’ Estimates of Future Expense

Respondents in marketing surveys are often asked to estimate future expenses on products and services to assist marketers in arriving at market‐share forecasts. To estimate future expenses for products and services, respondents may use information about past expenses, information about past behavioral frequencies for a related behavior, or both, if they are elicited prior to eliciting estimates of future expenses. To the extent that these sources of information are biased due to the manner in which they are elicited, subsequent estimates of future expense are biased. This article investigates the effect of response alternatives used to elicit behavioral frequencies on subsequent estimates of future expense related to the behavior. Two experiments demonstrate that past and future expense estimates are affected by the range of response alternatives used to elicit a related behavioral frequency prior to eliciting the expense estimate. This effect holds, however, only when the behavior is irregular. Further, the relative use of past expenses versus behavioral frequencies to estimate future expenses is a function of the presence and range of response alternatives used to elicit the behavioral frequency, the regularity of the behavior, and the order in which these are elicited. The results emphasize that the importance of question sequencing in surveys is a function of the regularity of the target behavior.