Unrelated efforts trigger wishful winning? The impact of extraneous efforts on judgments of winning probability among Chinese consumers

Through three sets of studies of Chinese consumers, we demonstrate that effort expenditure motivates consumers to obtain rewards, which in turn induces wishful thinking in unrelated domains and events and increases their judgments of winning probability. Moreover, we found that effort significantly affected consumers’ judgments of winning probability when it was not rewarded, but that this effect disappeared when effort was rewarded. In this paper, we discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of these findings.