Abstract:

Perceived waiting time is defined as how individuals perceive and feel about the duration they have to wait and how it affects their approach behavior. This paper systematically reviews the effective factors that could have an impact on perceived waiting time, which includes objective factors and subjective factors. The objective factors include the fillers, certainty, service phase and the physical environment during waiting time; the subjective factors contain negative emotions, self-control and personality. Moreover, It results in irrational decision making behaviors, such as time sunk cost effect, delay/speed-up framing effect, peak-end effect, preference reversal, et al. Future research direction includes: (1) Compare the differences of perceived waiting time under the conduction of time priming and money priming; (2) Study the rules of perceived waiting time in the view of time mental accounting; (3) Explore the mechanism of waiting time based on the time perception theory models.

Key words: perceived waiting time, time sunk cost effect, delay/speed-up framing effect, peak-end effect, preference reversal