The value of time, with and without a smartphone

Smartphones can lower the disutility of waiting by enabling productivity and making time pass more pleasantly. We elicit the compensation required by subjects to wait for 30 minutes, alone in an empty room, under four different conditions that varied access to the subject’s smartphone. Compared to the treatment where subjects had full use of their phone, we find that they required 24% percent more to wait with the audio features of the phone remaining but the phone physically locked away, 48% percent more to wait with only an FM radio, and 79% percent more to wait in a quiet room.