Author: Paul Mills (Writer on marketing)Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
This dissertation addresses two major themes in behavioral pricing; how consumers construct and use reference prices to judge the attractiveness of a price, and how guilt, and perceptions of fairness, influence consumer behavior. Essay 1 examines how consumers judge the attractiveness of prices in a new context. Prior research on coupons has focused on individual coupons that are "pushed" to consumers. When assessing individual coupons, consumers are apt to use a memory-based, or internal reference price strategy that relies on past purchases to assess price attractiveness. This dissertation examines a setting in which supermarket shoppers scan a product's bar code to receive a set mobile coupons for competing products. Coupon values are customized according to each customer's redemption history. Evaluating a set of "pull" coupons prompts some consumers to use a comparative, or stimulus-based reference price strategy. By segmenting consumers according to which strategy they use, I model how coupon value, the number of competing coupons, range of prices for competing brands, and brand loyalty influence redemption behavior over months of coupon use. While my research focuses on mobile coupons, the findings may be useful to marketers interested in other settings where consumers receive information about competing brands, such as the price comparison tools and recommendation engines used by retailers like Google and Amazon.Within the behavioral pricing literature, price fairness has important status, since firms' profits are constrained by fear of perceived price exploitation. Since firms have traditionally had the power to set prices, most studies have examined price fairness from the firm's perspective. However, as consumers' power increases, so does their tendency to take advantage of companies. Essay 2 addresses a gap in the price fairness literature by empirically testing whether an individual trait, anticipated guilt, together with information about social norms of fairness, constrain the selfish behavior of consumers who are allowed to pay any price they want. I find that anticipated guilt, contingent on the salience of social norms, plays a significant role in determining how selfishly consumers behave. Guilt proneness matters more when consumers are less certain about what response is socially acceptable than when they are provided with information about what others consider fair. I then show that these results are robust across two other settings prone to opportunism: abusing merchandise return policies, and engaging in computer piracy.
