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in free-recall tasks (e.g., short-term price recall in the study of Schindler and Kibarian, 1993)
and unrealistic conditions (e.g., the several minutes given to respondents to examine an
advertisement showing only one price in the study of Schindler and Kibarian, 1993).
Respondents in the study of Bizer and Schindler (2005) were asked to make quantitative
estimations of the number of items with either nine-ending prices (e.g., $2.99, $4.99) or
zero-ending prices one penny higher (e.g., $3.00, $5.00) that could be purchased given a
total budget of $73. If people do indeed drop off the last digits of a nine-ending price during
the perception process, then this would make the perceived price much smaller than it
actually is (e.g., perceiving $2.99 as $2.00), which would cause the quantitative estimation of
items with nine-ending prices to be much greater than that of items with zero-ending prices,
as more items could be purchased within a given budget for a lower perceived price (Bizer
and Schindler, 2005). For example, the number of items that could be purchased for $73 for
the prices $2.99 and $3.00 is practically the same (24.3 items vs. 24.4 items). However, if the
actual price of $2.99 is perceived as $2.00 or a price somewhere between $2.00 and $3.00 by
dropping off the ending digits, then the quantitative volume that could be purchased for $73
would be much greater (more than 24.3 items, at least) than that given a price of $3.00.
Stiving and Winer (1997) propose that rounding down and left to right comparison are
not similar, but closely related. Rounding down and left to right comparison seem
indistinguishable and lead to identical results when the left-hand digits are different;
however, left to right comparison may be regarded as a modified version of rounding down
when the left-hand digits are the same. In addition, memory effect, which takes into
consideration an individual’s limited memory capacity, means that people merely remember
the first digits of a price and have poorer memories for odd prices than for even prices.
Consistent with the later studies of Thomas and Morwitz (2005), Stiving and Winer (1997)
propose that the nine-ending pricing effect is the left-digit effect, indicating that it is the
change in the leftmost digit, rather than the ending digit to its right, that influences the
magnitude perception of numerical symbols.
2.3 The Link between Evaluation Modes and the Nine-Ending Effect
As prior research indicates, there are two important influences on the nine-ending
pricing effect that need to be investigated further. These are cognitive effort and evaluation
mode. With regard to cognitive effort, most explanations of the nine-ending effect assume
that some kind of heuristics involving mental effort is involved in price evaluation. For
example, according to the moderator called distance effect, as examined by Thomas and