Finally, on one day in the month they received a charge card statement of HK$ 6200 (ostensibly for acquisition liabilities incurred in a previous month) and were asked to pay for it by writing a check. While the amount of the charge card bill was constant for all subjects, its temporal location differed across conditions. In the early payment condition, the statement and the check appeared on the third day of the month, while in the late payment condition, these materials appeared on the 27th day of the month. Hence, while all booklets contained the same information, they differed in terms of temporal arrangement of the acquisitions and payments according to a 2 (Acquisition: Early or Late) × 2 (Payment: Early or Late) between-subjects design. The expense information on each page was embedded with other information ostensibly relevant to the cover story. We added this other information as we wanted to ensure that there was not a significant difference between the time spend on days which had no acquisitions relative to days that had acquisitions. Note that the timing of theacquisition liability corresponds to the timing of past expenses as studied by prior literature (e.g., Soman 2001).