Opportunity cost of purchases

In a study on opportunity cost, 150 students were given the following statement: "Imagine that you have been saving some extra money on the side to make some purchases, and on your most recent visit to the video store you come across a special sale on a new video. This video is one with your favorite actor or actress, and your favorite type of movie (such as a comedy, drama, thriller, etc.). This particular video that you are considering is one you have been thinking about buying for a long time. It is available for a special sale price of $14.99. What would you do in this situation? Please circle one of the options below." Half of the students were given the following two options: (A) Buy this entertaining video. (B) Not buy this entertaining video. The other half were given the following two options (note the modified option B): (A) Buy this entertaining video. (B) Not buy this entertaining video. Keep the $14.99 for other purchases. The results of this study are in this dataset.

Usage

opportunity_cost

Format

A data frame with 150 observations on the following 2 variables.

group

a factor with levels control and treatment

decision

a factor with levels buy video and not buy video

Source

Frederick S, Novemsky N, Wang J, Dhar R, Nowlis S. 2009. Opportunity Cost Neglect. Journal of Consumer Research 36: 553-561.

Examples

library(ggplot2)

table(opportunity_cost)
#>            decision
#> group       buy video not buy video
#>   control          56            19
#>   treatment        41            34

ggplot(opportunity_cost, aes(y = group, fill = decision)) +
  geom_bar(position = "fill")