Holiday gifts: does more time to return change a simulated buying decision?

The same gift, three deadlines

Imagine it is October 14, 2026. A $60 sweater is an online gift for an adult recipient on December 25, and you are unsure of their size. Delivery is free and takes five days. You pay now; future price and stock are unknown. An unworn sweater with its tags can be mailed back for free for a full refund.

January 7 minus November 13: -0.5 pp. January 31 minus November 13: 0.0 pp. These secondary comparisons were also fixed in advance.

Every generated choice

Displayed percentages may not sum to 100 because of rounding.

Likelihood and deadline identification

Deadline identification was asked last in a fresh session with the scenario repeated. Correct identification does not prove that an earlier choice understood it. Incorrect, unsure, invalid and missing deadline answers remain in the primary comparison.

Who qualified, and which answers were usable?

We screened 3,000 synthetic US adult profiles before treatment: 2,719 answered Yes to expecting to buy at least one holiday gift online for the December 2026 season, 267 No, and 0 Unsure. There were 0 invalid and 14 missing screening answers. We selected 1,200 strict Yes records before random assignment, 400 per deadline; 1519 qualifying records were not selected.

The demographic source is 2020–2024 ACS adults living in housing units, excluding group quarters. The candidate set spans 50 states plus DC; the achieved experimental cohort spans 51 jurisdictions. Unique source people can share demographic templates: 3,000 candidates generated 2,839 distinct persona prompts. Cached urbanicity uses a PUMA-name heuristic, not an individually observed ACS urban/rural field. These are not independent human respondents.

Counts below are assigned / attempted / valid / invalid / missing. Missing means no nonempty generated response, including unattempted records; invalid means a nonempty response failed its format rule. Attempted counts people with an actual HTTP request.

Q3 asked for a standalone main decision consideration; it did not explain a separately recorded choice. No generated text is presented as a customer quotation. Length-limited text generations: A: 0; B: 0; C: 0.

What this result can help decide

This controlled scenario gives a retailer a concrete question for its own checkout or return-policy research: does extending an already post-holiday deadline change purchase decisions enough to justify the operational cost? The synthetic result supplies a hypothesis to test. It supplies no measured customer behavior or business return.

Method and limits

Assignment balanced frozen age, household-income and Census-region blocks and guaranteed 400 records per arm. Each question used an independent session, the same assigned scenario and no previous answers. Closed questions used genuinely generated choices; numeric likelihood used a generated integer. Invalid responses were retained and reported. No answer-dependent retries, replacement people, calibration or forced ordering were used. Primary results use equal weights within each arm.

All-assigned missing-response bounds for January 31 minus January 7 are 0.5 pp to 0.5 pp. The materials available by request also includes ranges computed from 2,000 within-arm resamples of the fixed whole-person output records. These missing-response bounds collapse because every main answer is present. Zero-width resampling ranges reflect no variation in the fixed generated records, not certainty about the model or people. The ranges describe roster sensitivity; they are not a human margin of error, repeated-generation variability or evidence of model validity. Shared model outputs and repeated templates limit their interpretation.

The news context is Walmart Marketplace’s August 31 holiday return announcement: most qualifying purchases made October 1–December 31 can be returned through January 31, 2027, with exceptions. This experiment is an unbranded hypothetical, not a description of that policy or a brand endorsement.

Protocol locked at 2026-10-14T20:00:35.471514+00:00. Request research materials.