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臺大管理論叢
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26
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2
期
79
Morwitz (2005), the farther (closer) the two prices being compared, the less (greater) the
efforts in encoding the magnitude of the nine-ending prices, in regard to the left-digit effect.
They also prove that people will more likely rely on a simplifying leftmost-heuristic for the
judgment of the nine-ending effect under a high cognitive load. Stiving and Winer (1997)
demonstrate that people will easily tend to use a rounding down or left-to-right heuristic
without expending the extra mental processing efforts to evaluate the nine-ending effect
(Coulter, 2001; Schindler and Chandrashekaran, 2004). A study based on cognitive effort by
Schindler and Warren (1988) finds that the effect of nine-ending prices depended on the
amount of attention people paid to the decision to purchase. Furthermore, Bizer and
Schindler (2005) propose that a mental drop-off will occur upon immediate perception of the
price. In summation, the heuristic process with a low cognitive effort is the main focus of
previous nine-ending effect research. However, the HSM shows that it is important to
understand the mechanism whereby people become involved in a systematic process and
what decisions are chosen after their involvement in this condition. Along with Garbarino
and Edell (1997), Bizer and Schindler (2005) further review the research on cognitive effort
and maintain that humans often switch to heuristics that may cause inaccurate decisions,
biased responses, and preference reversals due to their limited cognitive resources. Thomas
and Morwitz (2005) also discuss whether or not awareness and cognitive effort can mitigate
the nine-ending effect, but they do not empirically test these issues. Above-mentioned studies
all indicate that cognitive effort is a key factor in determining whether or not the effects of
nine-ending pricing appear.
The other important key is the evaluation mode. Although various experimental
conditions have been constructed to investigate the nine-ending and zero-ending pricing
effects, they are mostly evaluated separately in experimental designs (e.g., Bizer and
Schindler, 2005; Manning and Sprott, 2009). Only Thomas and Morwitz (2005) study has
people evaluating prices in comparison, but their experiments only measure the price
magnitude perception of the target price after comparing it to the standard price. That is, the
two target prices are not directly compared side by side as in the real world. What is more,
all of the previous research has ignored the evaluation mode of SQE. Given the nine-ending
research on cognitive effort, along with the HSM provided by Chaiken (1980), this article
infers that the occurrence of the nine-ending effect will depend on the amount of cognitive
effort expended. In conclusion, the nine-ending effect will occur in a heuristic decision-
making process when the decision is made in the SE mode; however, no effect will occur in
a systematic process when the decision is made in the JE mode, which requires more