Consumers often have to wait during the process of acquiring and consuming many products and services. These waiting experiences are typically negative and have been known to affect customers¡¦ overall satisfaction with the product or service. To better manage these waiting experiences, many firms have instituted a variety of programs to reduce the actual duration of the wait. However, consumers are influenced by their perceptions of the waiting duration, not the actual one. Therefore, understanding how consumers perceive their waiting time is particularly important in the marketing of service. In this paper, I use laboratory experiment method and examine the impact of mood, distance to the goal state, and filled mechanism on consumers¡¦ perceptions of waiting time and their affective responses. A total of 206 students recruited at the university participated in the study. The results demonstrate that people in a positive mood tend to perceive shorter duration of the wait than those in a negative mood. Further, the distance to the goal state, i.e. the stage at which the delay occurs during the service encounter, has the impacts on consumers¡¦ time perception and affective responses. The delay produced longer time estimates and stronger affective responses at further from the goal state than at closer to the goal state. And filling time resulted in shorter time perception and less negative emotions. However, the relevance to the service of filled mechanism will not affect consumers¡¦ time estimates but only consumers¡¦ positive affective responses. The distance to the goal and different kind of filled mechanism have an interactive effect only on the time perceptions. Moreover, consumers¡¦ involvements toward service and time style have moderating effects. The higher the involvement, the longer the time estimates and the more negative responses. Qualitative subjects perceived longer waiting time, and quantitative ones have more positive affective responses.

There has been an enormous growth in the Internet usage in recent years, fueled by the increasing number of multimedia applications and widespread availability of World Wide Web (WWW). The end-user generally accesses these applications through web browsing activities. These time-critical services often suffer from the delays ranging from small chunks to long peaks which can have severe implications on the Quality of Experience (QoE). Hence, it is worthwhile to identify the impact of different variations of delay on the end-user QoE. This research focused on the end-user QoE for three different distributions of delays occurring during an e-commerce shopping experiment. By keeping the overall waiting time of every sessions same, the study shows that the end-user QoE is different for different variety of delays. And the research also concludes that, the users prefer small frequently occurring delays as compared to the long rarely occurring delays within a task-driven web browsing session.