Immediate or delayed? The impact of temporal discounting on the choice of payment schemes in mobile games

Abstract

To incentivize in-game payments, mobile game operators frequently offer payment schemes with additional bonuses. Grounded in temporal discounting theory, this study investigates how design features of in-game payment schemes influence users’ payment intentions and preferences for different payment schemes. Focusing on two prevalent incentive formats—immediate versus delayed bonuses—we developed a theoretical framework examining the psychological mechanisms underlying users’ preference formation. Through an online experiment incorporating a temporal discounting task (N = 332), we empirically tested the proposed framework. The results revealed three critical design features significantly affect users’ adoption of payment schemes with delayed bonuses: (1) bonus delay duration, (2) discount magnitude relative to payment schemes with immediate bonuses, and (3) required payment scales. Given the potential advantages of payment schemes with delayed bonuses for enhancing user retention and loyalty, we further proposed and tested two design optimization strategies. The experimental findings demonstrated that both displaying the total amount of delayed bonuses and increasing the initial installment bonus effectively promote users’ preference for payment schemes with delayed bonuses. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that the level of incentives applied to delayed bonus payment schemes can serve as a critical boundary condition, potentially determining the effectiveness of these optimization strategies.