Two Essays on the Role of Price Promotion in Consumer Choice Behavior

Two Essays on the Role of Price Promotion in Consumer Choice Behavior PDF Author: Sangman Han
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Two Essays on the Role of Price Promotion in Consumer Choice Behavior

Two Essays on the Role of Price Promotion in Consumer Choice Behavior PDF Author: Sangman Han
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Essays on Consumers' Goal Orientation and Price Sensitivity

Essays on Consumers' Goal Orientation and Price Sensitivity PDF Author: Woo Jin Choi
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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The objective of my dissertation work was to provide a better understanding of consumer choices related to these two important tradeoffs that consumers are often confronted with in the marketplace. Drawing upon regulatory focus theory, I investigated how consumers choose between price and quality or price and quantity, in each of two essays, thereby shedding light on the role of consumer goals in purchase decisions. In the first essay, I propose that quality is predominantly a promotion feature whereas price is predominantly a prevention feature. Therefore, promotion oriented consumers should be more attentive to differences in product quality whereas prevention oriented consumers should be more attentive to differences in product price. Three studies demonstrate that quality (price) is more strongly associated with a promotion (prevention) orientation, that promotion (prevention) oriented consumers prefer products with higher quality (cheaper prices), and that these preferences are mitigated when consumers do not need to prioritize between price and quality and are mediated by relative attention to quality versus price. In the second essay, I investigate the manner in which consumers' goal orientations affect their preferences for monetary versus nonmonetary promotional offers, such as bonus packs and price discounts. I propose that consumers with a promotion (vs. prevention) orientation are more likely to prefer a bonus pack offer over an economically equivalent price discount offer. Two pretests and one study provide empirical support for this key prediction. I also identify theoretically defensible and managerially actionable boundary conditions for this effect that are related to price levels and product types.

Two Essays on the Implications of Demand State Dependence on Pricing Decisions

Two Essays on the Implications of Demand State Dependence on Pricing Decisions PDF Author: Polykarpos Pavlidis
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ISBN:
Category : Consumer behavior
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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"Marketing strategies that firms adopt are based on consumers' response in the marketplace when they face and interact with these strategies. This dissertation examines the tendency of consumers to repeat their last purchase choices and the implications of this type of behavior on pricing related strategies of consumer packaged goods brand manufacturers. The first essay is a theory based empirical investigation about the commonly observed practice of brands offering temporary price promotions. There have been many theories that attempt to explain the popularity of price promotions as a marketing tool but with very few exceptions they are disconnected from choice dynamics. We examine the empirical support of a recent theory that connects price promotions with demand state dependence. In our investigation we measure how much each brand benefits from the consumers' tendency to repeat purchase and we examine the connection between this measure (AMEL) and the brands' price promotional frequencies. Our extensive sample includes all major brands from twenty product categories of frequently purchased goods and twenty stores in two separate geographical markets. Our empirical model accounts explicitly for the dependence of price promotions on demand response and vice versa. In summary, we find significant and robust evidence that brands which gainmore from consumers' repeat purchase behavior are offered on promotion formore weeks on average. We also demonstrate the value of our proposed estimation algorithm over simpler, two-step, approaches. In the second essay we examine consumers' state dependence not only to specific choice alternatives but also to parent brands that cover multiple sub-brands. Using a structural, forward looking, pricing model for multiproduct firms, we explore the implications of parent brand state dependence on equilibrium prices and firm profitability through counterfactual experiments. Empirically, we examine household level choice data from the category of yogurt and estimate state dependence to both the parent brand and the sub-brand level. We find evidence of parent brand state dependence for the category of yogurt. Its impact on the market equilibrium is to push prices downwards, because firms invest in future demand, and increase profitability of multiproduct firms, because per period demand increases"--Leaves iv-v.

Essays on Two Novel Pricing Mechanisms

Essays on Two Novel Pricing Mechanisms PDF Author: Paul Mills (Writer on marketing)
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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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.

Three Essays on Consumer Behavior Under Uncertainty

Three Essays on Consumer Behavior Under Uncertainty PDF Author: Koichi Yonezawa
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ISBN:
Category : Consumer behavior
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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It is well understood that decisions made under uncertainty differ from those made without risk in important and significant ways. Yet, there is very little research into how uncertainty manifests itself in the most ubiquitous of decision-making environments: Consumers' day-to-day decisions over where to shop, and what to buy for their daily grocery needs. Facing a choice between stores that either offer relatively stable "everyday low prices" (EDLP) or variable prices that reflect aggressive promotion strategies (HILO), consumers have to choose stores under price-uncertainty. I find that consumers' attitudes toward risk are critically important in determining store-choice, and that heterogeneity in risk attitudes explains the co-existence of EDLP and HILO stores - an equilibrium that was previously explained in somewhat unsatisfying ways. After choosing a store, consumers face another source of risk. While knowing the quality or taste of established brands, consumers have very little information about new products. Consequently, consumers tend to choose smaller package sizes for new products, which limits their exposure to the risk that the product does not meet their prior expectations. While the observation that consumers purchase small amounts of new products is not new, I show how this practice is fully consistent with optimal purchase decision-making by utility-maximizing consumers. I then use this insight to explain how manufacturers of consumer packaged goods (CPGs) respond to higher production costs. Because consumers base their purchase decisions in part on package size, manufacturers can use package size as a competitive tool in order to raise margins in the face of higher production costs. While others have argued that manufacturers reduce package sizes as a means of raising unit-prices (prices per unit of volume) in a hidden way, I show that the more important effect is a competitive one: Changes in package size can soften price competition, so manufacturers need not rely on fooling consumers in order to pass-through cost increases through changes in package size. The broader implications of consumer behavior under risk are dramatic. First, risk perceptions affect consumers' store choice and product choice patterns in ways that can be exploited by both retailers and manufacturers. Second, strategic considerations prevent manufacturers from manipulating package size in ways that seem designed to trick consumers. Third, many services are also offered as packages, and also involve uncertainty, so the effects identified here are likely to be pervasive throughout the consumer economy.

American Doctoral Dissertations

American Doctoral Dissertations PDF Author:
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ISBN:
Category : Dissertation abstracts
Languages : en
Pages : 784

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An Investigation of the Allocative Role of Price in Consumer Choice

An Investigation of the Allocative Role of Price in Consumer Choice PDF Author: Dogan Eroglu
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ISBN:
Category : Consumer behavior
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Dual Role of Price in Consumer Choice

Dual Role of Price in Consumer Choice PDF Author: Sungjee Choi
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Consumers commonly compare prices as well as consider quality when they are in the grocery store to save their budget and to keep a minimum level of quality. However, consumers cannot gauge every single product's quality, and it is often shown people utilize price as a product quality indicator. The goal of the study is to reassess the price sensitivity theory which is consumers have lower price sensitivity for higher priced product. Also, this research examines price's dual roles in consumers' decision-making processes: 1) as a constraint and 2) as a quality cue. Consumers use price as a quality cue to alleviate uncertainty in their decision-making process. Several literatures in the marketing science area found asymmetric brand switching behavior and price tiers among brands using consumer panel data. Two arguments throughout the previous studies are 1) there is a positive correlation between price and quality, and 2) there is a negative correlation between price and price sensitivity. Following the previous literature, the utility model from the economics traditional logit model is developed by having additional parameter which is price and quality association. By adding price and quality association parameter, this study proposes a new developed model which captures the effects of price role as a quality cue on consumers' utility. The developed logit model is estimated via Hierarchical Bayesian framework.The results provide partial support for the prediction that higher priced products have lower price sensitivity. Overall, however, the findings of this paper argue that consumers react more to high priced products' price change than to low priced products' price change. This is because we have two distinct consumer groups and only small portion of consumers follow the price sensitivity theory. Consumers who have a large P-Q association are not as price sensitive as consumers having a small P-Q association. As a result, the overall level of price sensitivity dictates whether or not a P-Q association is observed. The implications of this finding and directions for future research are also discussed at the end of the paper.

Essays on Consumer Shopping Behavior and Price Dispersion

Essays on Consumer Shopping Behavior and Price Dispersion PDF Author: Aleksandr Yankelevich
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ISBN:
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 116

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Essay 1: "Price-Matching in a Sequential Search Duopoly" While substantial research has tried to determine if price-matching guarantees are anti-competitive, most previous studies have overlooked the effect that these policies have on consumer search behavior. This essay examines how price-matching guarantees affect consumer behavior and prices in a model of sequential price search. By endogenizing consumers' acquisition of price information, I find that price-matching may raise prices in three new ways. First, price-matching diminishes firms' incentives to lower prices to attract consumers who have no cost of search. Second, for consumers with positive search costs, price-matching lowers the marginal benefit of search, inducing them to accept higher prices. Finally, higher prices may come about because price-matching can lead to asymmetric equilibria where one firm runs fewer sales and both firms tend to offer smaller discounts than in a symmetric equilibrium. These price increasing effects grow in proportion to the number of consumers who make use of price-matching guarantees as well as in the amount of asymmetry that prevails in equilibrium. Essay 2: "Asymmetric Sequential Search" (with Carmen Astorne-Figari) Rival firms often find themselves catering to a very different mix of customers from that of their competitors. This can lead to variations in pricing behavior even when other factors, such as product quality and the cost of production, are held constant across firms. In this essay, we use a model of sequential consumer price search to explore how asymmetries in the demand structures across firms impact firm pricing. In our model, a fraction of consumers must pay a cost to search for prices beyond their local firm and firms serve different fractions of local consumers. The price distribution of a firm with more local consumers first order stochastically dominates that of a firm with fewer local consumers and places positive probability on its upper bound. This means that a firm with more local consumers has a higher average price and runs sales less frequently. The frequency of sales diminishes in the number of local consumers, but price dispersion persists even if all consumers are local to a single firm. Moreover, as the fraction of consumers who search without cost increases, firms tend to offer bigger discounts, while the likelihood of a sale may fall. Essay 3: "Energizer: The Bunny or the Battery? Advertising as a Way to Publicize Either the Brand or the Good" (with Carmen Astorne-Figari) Experimental studies and surveys of consumers suggest that an important role of advertising is to convince consumers that they want the product and to buy it from the brand advertising it. However, because of competitive clutter, an advertisement that induces a consumer to enter the market may lead her to purchase from a competing brand. Thus, we can characterize two effects of advertising: (i) an effect that benefits the individual firm by promoting binding between the brand and the advertised good and (ii) a "public good" quality that benefits all producers of the good by inducing additional consumers to enter the market. We analyze these two effects to study the relationship between advertising and market size, price, firm profit and consumer welfare.

Two Essays on the Marketing of Durable Goods

Two Essays on the Marketing of Durable Goods PDF Author: Raghunath Singh Rao
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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