> To test that theory, they asked college students to imagine using an online company to buy concert tickets for Row 10. The participants then were randomly instructed to consider receiving seating that was either worse than, better than, or exactly as promised. They then indicated their level of satisfaction with the purchase

Does anyone else find this type of study completely unconvincing?

I assume that the students are being asked to pick a number 1 through 10 to express their level of satisfaction. They're just going to pick an arbitrary point which is going to be different for everyone. You can label the points (10 is winning gold at the Olympics, 1 is your spouse dying) but it's really hard to place something like buying concert tickets onto that scale.

The only way you could get actual information out of such a study would be to ask the same student how satisfied they are with a row 10 seat, a better seat, and a worse seat, but that will only tell you the obvious - that they are to some extent more satisfied with the better seat and less satisfied with the worse seat - and not give you any interesting information about whether it's a significant difference.