How Should Time Estimates Be Structured to Increase Customer Satisfaction?

Businesses across industries, such as food delivery apps and GPS navigation systems, routinely provide customers with time estimates in inherently uncertain contexts. How does the format of these time estimates affect customers’ satisfaction? In particular, should companies provide customers with a point estimate representing the best estimate, or should they communicate the inherent uncertainty in outcomes by providing a range estimate? In eight preregistered experiments (N = 5,323), participants observed time estimates provided by an app, and we manipulated whether the app presented the time estimates as a point estimate (e.g., “Your food will arrive in 45 minutes.”) or a range (e.g., “Your food will arrive in 40–50 minutes.”). After participants learned about the app’s prediction performance by sampling a set of past outcomes, we measured participants’ evaluation of the app. We find that participants judged the app more positively when it provided a range rather than a point estimate. These results held across different domains, different time durations, different underlying outcome distributions, and an incentive-compatible design. We also find that this preference is not simply due to people’s dislike of late outcomes, as participants also rated ranges more positively than conservative point estimates corresponding to the upper (i.e., later) bound of the range. These findings suggest that companies can increase customer satisfaction with realized time estimates by communicating the uncertainty inherent in these time estimates. This paper was accepted by Jack Soll, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: This research was supported by the Bakar Faculty Fellowship at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and the Beatrice Foods Co. Faculty Research Fund at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.00137 .