State Dependence in Hedonic Experiences

This paper investigates state dependence in self-curated experiences, those where individuals sequentially select and consume a series of unique options in real time. Leveraging large-scale data from Spotify listening sessions, complemented by experimental evidence, this paper finds that consumers exhibit positive state dependence in these. Consumers are more likely to skip a song, exit a session, and report lower enjoyment the more dissimilar a song is from previously consumed songs. Moreover, there is a decay in this effect, such that the distance to the most recently played song has a stronger effect than the distance to songs played 2-back and 3-back. Finally, we find that consumer effort (actively rejecting options) results in less consumed variety overall, indicating that active curation narrows rather than expands experiential variety.

Recommended citation: Yuan, Lisha and Nader Tavassoli. "State Dependence in Hedonic Experiences." Working Paper, 2025.