The role of time-of-day in variety-seeking behaviour: A self-control account

Abstract

This research investigates an important factor, called time-of-day, and how it influences variety-seeking behaviour in the context of video and podcast consumption. Specifically, I propose that consumers seek less variety in the morning and more variety in the evening in video and podcast domains, and this prediction is moderated by consumers’ chronotypes, morning-types and evening-types. I argue that consumers have high self-control in the morning, but consumers have low self-control in the evening. Consequently, this drives greater variety-seeking behaviour in the evening but less variety-seeking in the morning. Across five studies (N = 1630), approved by Monash’s Research Ethics Committee (40003), I provide empirical evidence by recruiting participants via Prolific and MTurk platforms in the morning and evening.

In Study 1 and Study 2, I found that consumers seek less variety in the domain of podcast consumption by selecting fewer choices of podcast categories in the morning but seek more variety by selecting a diverse set of choices in the evening. In Study 3 and Study 4, I extended the investigation by examining consumers’ variety-seeking in video context. Both studies demonstrated that consumers seek less variety in the morning and more variety in the evening. In relation to the self-control account, and across four studies, I utilised self-reported measures of self-control and a behavioural proxy measure, called time spend on survey, that is automatically recorded by Qualtrics survey. The mediation analysis shows non-significant results, except in Study 3, where time spend on survey mediated the relationship between time-of-day and variety-seeking behaviour in video context. Moreover, Study 5 (pre-registered at https://aspredicted.org/nqxw-68hb.pdf) examined the moderating role of consumers’ chronotypes by randomly assigning morning-type and evening-type participants to morning and evening sessions. The results show non-significant interaction effect.

The results have theoretical and practical implications. It extends prior research on time-of-day by studying variety-seeking behaviour in the online domain. Managers are also encouraged to strategies their variety offerings across the day, such as playing more diverse music genres in their stores in the evening. Finally, limitations and future directions are discussed.