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Keep Forgetting to Make a Shopping List? Don’t Beat Yourself up over It!

ABSTRACT This study aims to determine the impact of shopping lists on consumer spending and healthy shopping behaviors. A non-hypothetical field experiment was conducted, using the online platform Amazon Mechanical Turks, to determine the value 228 consumers place on these self commitment devices via their willingness-to-accept (to give up their list) or equivalent gain (to write a list) for a shopping list during a grocery shopping trip. By randomly determining who kept and who gave up shopping lists, we are able to explore causal effects of lists on food spending and the healthiness of food purchases. We find that after controlling for conscientiousness, consumers willingness-to-accept to give up their shopping list is $5.05, while the equivalent gain to write a shopping list is $3.87. We did not however find a significant difference in the healthiness of the purchases made by consumers using a shopping list versus those without. There is a lack of prior research on this topic – particularly papers that use a random assignment to treatment. Previous studies have explored correlations between shopping list use and spending; however, this study provides a value of list use, utilizes a credible approach to determine impact of list use disentangled from unobserved confounds, and provides insights on impact of shopping lists on healthy eating.