【公开学术报告-第147期】Time Cost Illusions: Purchase–Usage Gap in Online Education

Time Cost Illusions: Purchase–Usage Gap in Online Education

Speaker: Yulin HAO (Ph.D. Candidate in Marketing, University of Rochester)

Date & Time: Wed. 12, November 2025, from 10:30 to 12:00 (Beijing Time)

Place: Tongji Building A2101 

ABSTRACT

Using proprietary data containing complete consumer purchase and usage records from a large farmer education platform in China, we document a substantial purchase–usage gap: on average, consumers complete only 30% of the content they buy, despite an average course price of $74. We trace this gap to a time cost illusion: consumers underestimate the time cost of learning at purchase and thus choose courses that demand more effort than they can commit. More importantly, marketing messages that downplay effort amplify this bias. Over successive purchases, consumers partially correct the bias by shifting toward shorter, easier courses and becoming less susceptible to marketing messages. We build a structural model of purchase and usage in which marketing messages affect perceived time cost. Estimates imply that, at purchase, perceived cost is only one-third of the true cost and that marketing-induced illusion reduces consumer surplus by $48 per enrollment. Disabling effort-downplaying marketing messages lowers purchases by 12 percentage points but raises usage by 21 percent, as consumers self-select into lower-cost courses. Counterfactual simulations show that either (i) splitting long courses into shorter modules or (ii) disclosing historical completion rate reduces the purchase—usage gap by aligning ex-ante expectations with ex-post usage.

GUEST BIO:

Yulin Hao is a Ph.D. candidate in Quantitative Marketing (2020 – 2026 expected) at the Simon Business School, University of Rochester (USA), where he also pursues an M.S. in Business Research. Prior to this, he completed a Research Master's in Economics at Sciences Po (Paris Institute of Political Studies, France) from 2018 to 2020. He earned a B.A. in Economics with Summa cum laude from Sichuan University (China, 2014 – 2018) and participated in an exchange program at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan. His research interests span substantive areas, including Digital Platforms, the Creator Economy, Salesforce, and Marketing for Social Good, with a methodological focus on Structural Models, Machine Learning, and Causal Inference.