Repetitive Buying Behavior An Empirical Investigation on the Role of Personal and Product Characteristics

This article provides a large scale empirical study on the extent of repetitive versus varietyseeking behavior in our daily shopping choices, and how this varies with personal and context characteristics. We utilize a unique database that records detailed grocery shopping histories for a nationwide sample of over 100,000 households observed over several years. Across a wide variety of product categories, we find that consumers display high levels of repetitive buying and narrow choice sets, even over an extended period of several years. This behavior is moderated by household and product specific factors. Repetitive buying behavior is found to increase with age, income, education, conservative ideology, and for males; and decrease with the frequency of purchase. These relationships vary with category characteristics that measure the stability of the choice context and the utilitarian versus hedonic nature of the product.