Wharton (2025) — Biological age and consumer behavior

Summary:

This paper asks whether “biological age” helps marketers understand consumers better than chronological age. Two people can be the same age in years but age differently — and that may shape what they do, buy, and how active they are.

Written by researchers at Wharton and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, it’s an academic study: they built a theory, then tested whether biological aging improved prediction of marketing-relevant outcomes.

They use the Health and Retirement Study (older US adults): ~4,000 participants with DNA methylation data, with smaller samples for some behaviors due to missing survey items.

The authors compare chronological age, felt age, and epigenetic “clock” measures of biological age. They relate these to self-reported activities and spending, group behaviors via factor analysis, and test prediction with cross-validated regression models. They also run mediation analyses to see whether biological age helps explain how aging influences behavior via health and functioning.

Key result: biological age adds meaningful predictive power beyond age-and-gender, and even beyond models including demographics, personality, lifestyle, and finances. Gains are strongest for technology use, physical activity, social activity, volunteering, and entertainment spending — especially technology use and entertainment.

Mediation results suggest chronological time affects behavior partly through biological aging, mainly via chronic disease burden, cognition, and grip strength. Self-rated health explains little, implying objective measures matter more here.

Caveats: many outcomes are self-reported; the sample is older Americans; missing data reduces sample sizes (notably for spending). The work is observational and mostly cross-sectional, so it can’t prove causality. Some behavior categories and labels were researcher-driven (including ChatGPT-assisted labeling).