Do consumers take advantage of common pricing standards? An experimental investigation

Sugden, Robert and Zheng, Jiwei (2018) Do consumers take advantage of common pricing standards? An experimental investigation. Management Science, 64 (5). pp. 2126-2143. ISSN 0025-1909

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Abstract

Gaudeul and Sugden have hypothesized that, when some but not all competing products are priced in a common standard, consumers who are liable to make errors in cross-standard price comparisons use decision rules that discriminate in favour of common-standard offers. Such behavior incentivizes sellers to use common standards. We report an experimental test of this hypothesis, using choice tasks similar to those represented in the Gaudeul–Sugden model. We found that offers priced in common standards were more likely to inspected but less likely to be chosen, and that subjects gained little benefit from common pricing standards that applied to some but not all offers. Most subjects used ‘dominance editing’ operations which eliminated transparently dominated offers, either as an initial shortlisting device or while offers were being sorted. Because these operations discriminate against common-standard offers, their use incentivizes sellers not to use common standards.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	shortlisting,common standard,dominance editing,consideration set
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Economics
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Centres > Centre for Competition Policy Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Economic Theory Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Centres > Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Sciences Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Behavioural Economics
Depositing User:	Pure Connector
Date Deposited:	24 Sep 2016 00:51
Last Modified:	20 Apr 2023 00:13
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/60246
DOI:	10.1287/mnsc.2016.2676

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