In increasingly important zero-price markets in the digital economy, it is time, not money, that consumers pay for the use of goods. From this point of view, analyzing how people perceive the price and consumption of time is one of the most fundamental issues in economics, just like analyzing monetary prices and consumption of market goods in classical economics. However, it has been known that people do not pay sufficient attention to shrouded attributes such as the value of time or the amount of time consumption. The main goal of this study is to understand how the biases in the recognition of both the value of time and the amount of time consumption affect the consumption of digital goods. More specifically, this study tries to empirically identify the inattention to the value of time, bias in time recognition, a consumer’s degree of sophistication, and estimate their welfare loss from the biases in misrecognition of the value of time and time consumption in the usage of smartphone apps.
