Procrastinators’ online experience and purchase behavior

This paper seeks to understand how marketers might capitalize on consumers’ increasing time spent online and convert online procrastination tendencies into purchase behavior. More specifically, the authors explore whether the propensity to use the Internet to avoid work tasks (online procrastination) leads to purchase behavior, and if so, what the mechanism underlying such an effect might be. Through two studies, the authors find that online procrastination positively impacts purchase, which in turn is indirectly affected by the consumers’ propensity to delay their decisions. The authors further find different likelihoods of purchase based on degrees of tendency to delay decisions, online users’ age, and type of online activities. Implications of these findings for informing managers about the ways to increase purchases for decisive and indecisive consumers who waste time online and raising online procrastinators’ awareness about their vulnerability to marketers are discussed.