How Companies Can Cash In on Uncertainty
Some deals in particular can feel like a win.
- By
- June 15, 2026
- CBR - Behavioral Science
At the checkout counter in the chain store Shoe Carnival, there’s often a wheel that customers can spin for a chance to win an extra deal or reward. Other businesses sometimes hand out scratch tickets that customers can play to discover a discount.
These can be effective promotions, suggests research by Chicago Booth’s Beidi Hu, Stony Brook University’s Siyuan Yin, and Georgetown’s Alice Moon. They find that when people make a purchase that involves some uncertainty, they’ll tend to compare the deal to a worse one that didn’t materialize—and prefer their outcome.
To study the effects of uncertainty, the researchers ran a series of experiments, including a variation on a feature used by the travel-agency website Priceline. Its Pricebreakers model turns hotel shopping into something of a game by showing three similar hotels offering discounted prices and encouraging customers to book a trip to find out which deal they’ve secured.
In one of the experiments, half of 600 online participants viewed a single hotel at a discounted nightly rate of $102. The rest saw three similar hotels whose regular prices ranged from $124 to $209 per night. The participants in this group were told that one of the hotels, randomly selected, would be offered at the discounted rate of $102—but they’d have to click forward to find out which. They then saw the same hotel the other group did, at the same rate.
Both groups were asked whether they’d book the hotel or keep searching. In the first group, whose members saw just one hotel option, 76 percent of participants said they would book. In the second group, whose members at first had been uncertain about which hotel option they would receive, nearly 90 percent said the same.
Unknown outcomes boost appeal
In experiments, participants valued products more when the offer involved uncertainty. For example, they were more likely to book a hotel when the offer was first framed as a randomly assigned “mystery” hotel, and they were more likely to sign up for a coffee subscription when a complimentary sample was presented as randomly selected.
In a different experiment, participants in a “certainty” group were told that they could receive a $25 gift card. Those in an “uncertainty” group were told they could receive a gift card that would be worth anywhere between $15 and $35—before learning it would be $25. (Participants were informed that 10 of them would receive real gift cards, which gave all of them an incentive to treat their situation as though the financial stakes were real.)
When asked whether they’d like to take a chance and gamble with their $25 gift card, participants in the uncertainty group, relative to the others, were more likely to keep it. To the researchers, this indicated that these participants valued it more highly than their counterparts in the certainty group did.
The findings confirm what the researchers dub the “uncertainty spillover effect,” whereby “people prefer goods obtained from an uncertain prospect over the same goods that were always certain.” Uncertainty, according to the study, increases someone’s preference for a final result because of a tendency to compare an actual outcome with worse ones we may have avoided. Say you’re told you could receive a product at an uncertain discount, whether 30 percent, 20 percent, or 10 percent. If the discount turns out to be the middle option, it feels like a win because 20 percent is better than 10 percent. You’re actually more likely to be happy than to be disappointed by the 30 percent savings you missed out on.
But you won’t necessarily feel unhappy if you receive the 10 percent discount. When participants received the lowest-valued gift card from a potential range, the uncertainty spillover effect disappeared. Unable to compare the card’s value to a worse one they’d avoided, they didn’t value the one they received any differently than did people who knew its value from the start.
Marketers may be especially interested in the researchers’ final experiment, which documented that the uncertainty spillover effect may drive subsequent purchasing behavior. About 1,500 online participants were told they could sign up for a free trial promotion for a monthly coffee subscription. Before they made their decision, they were offered a complimentary sample of ground coffee. Half the group was told the coffee would be randomly selected from an array of five roasts that varied in customer ratings; ultimately, they received a free sample of ground Italian coffee. For the other half, that Italian roast was the predetermined selection.
Participants in the uncertain condition were more likely to sign up for the monthly subscription than those in the certainty group (45 versus 39 percent). The researchers conclude that the “influence of uncertainty can carry over to subsequent consumption decisions.”
But the same logic cuts the other way. For example, surge pricing can make customers feel taken advantage of, the researchers note. “We caution companies against introducing uncertainty when consumers view the product or price as a loss. . . . Introducing uncertainty with losses may make consumers more likely to switch to alternatives, even after the uncertainty is resolved.”
Beidi Hu, Siyuan Yin, and Alice Moon, “When Goods Were Odds: Do People Prefer Goods that Stem from Uncertainty?” Journal of Consumer Research, April 2026.
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