Money and time are both scarce resources that people believe would bring them greater happiness. But would people prefer having more money or more time? And how does one’s preference between resources relate to happiness? Across studies, we asked thousands of Americans whether they would prefer more money or more time. Although the majority of people chose more money, choosing more time was associated with greater happiness—even controlling for existing levels of available time and money. Additional studies and experiments provide insight into choosers’ underlying rationale and the causal direction of the effect.

Many marketing communications, from verbal conversations to messaging and content sharing via apps such as Snapchat, limit the number of times people can view content. How do such restrictions affect consumers’ information processing? Building on the proposition that people strategically allocate cognitive resources, we hypothesize that consumers of content that cannot be viewed repeatedly consider the risk of failing to process it sufficiently, and consequently allocate more cognitive resources to its processing (e.g., by increasing viewing time). We test this hypothesis in ten pre-registered online studies (total N = 17,620), an exploratory analysis of eye tracking data, and a field study on Facebook’s advertising platform. Across the studies, we find that making content ephemeral elevates consumers’ perceived risk of missing information; consequently, it increases attention allocation, prolongs voluntary viewing time, and magnifies focus on relevant information. These effects have important downstream consequences, including improved content comprehension and recall, enhanced positive attitudes, and increased efficiency of sponsored content placement on social media. Taken together, our findings indicate that marketers can communicate information more effectively by restricting consumers from viewing it again.

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