Advancing versus delaying payments and consumer time orientation: A personal selling experiment

Abstract The authors propose that an individual's capacity to plan and delay consumer decisions may impact purchases within personal selling situations. An experiment was conducted to investigate the effects of postponing or expediting a payment for a car on purchase intentions. A scale, developed to categorize future‐ and present‐time oriented individuals, was employed as a moderating variable. The results indicate that a present‐time oriented person tends to prefer delayed payments over immediate payments. In contrast, a future‐time oriented person is more likely to prefer immediate payments than a present‐time oriented person. The results are discussed in relation to applications for developing adaptive selling strategies. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.