Metrics Matter for Messaging: Temporal Reframing Shifts Consumer Preferences for Incomes Near Salient Thresholds

Public policy debates about income, taxes, and benefits often focus on salient thresholds. For example, U.S. lawmakers have argued over a $15-per-hour minimum wage, $1,000-per-month guaranteed basic income, and whether those earning $300,000 per year should benefit from economic stimulus payments. However, as any income stream is temporally framed (i.e., per hour, per-month, per year), marketers can easily reframe income streams in policy messaging to highlight or obfuscate such salient thresholds. Field data and five pre-registered experiments demonstrate that consumers are attracted to income streams that exceed salient thresholds, and that changing the temporal frame attenuates or eliminates the extent to which such streams are favored. This effect arises due to reference-dependence caused by the temporal frame and likely not because of the left-digit bias. Moreover, we show that this effect arises even when the salient threshold is not a round number. We discuss implications of this phenomenon for managers and policymakers.