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消費者情緒在九尾數定價效果的影響
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1. Introduction
Do consumers always perceive a product or service with a nine-ending price to be
cheaper than one with a zero-ending price? Imagine you go to a shopping mall one
afternoon. While you are hanging around the mall, you see a pair of great looking jeans on
sale for $35. You think they are cheap and worth it, so buy them immediately.
Unfortunately, in the very next store, you find the same jeans you just bought are on sale
for only $19. Finding that you have paid $16 too much for your jeans, you feel upset and
disappointed. At the same time, you see a pair of great looking sunglasses on sale for $29.
Do you still think the sunglasses are cheap and worth buying despite your negative
emotions? Does the nine-ending price still attract you? This is a common experience
among consumers.
Traditional economic model of financial decision making leaves little room for the
influence of emotion. Likewise, price has typically been examined from the cognitive
perspective, occasionally with affect implicit in an empirical definition (O’Neill and
Lambert, 2001). Affective reactions influence judgment and decision making, even
without cognitive evaluations (Zajonc, 1980). Moreover, the emotional aspects can exert a
dominating influence on behavior when affective reactions and cognitive evaluations
diverge. Although it is clear that emotions are an important aspect of consumer behavior, it
is still not much to examine how emotions affect consumer response to price. This
research therefore is interested in how consumers process price information such as nine-
ending prices when they experience negative emotions such as upset or regret, and
whether happy consumers have different price perceptions to those of consumers in a
negative emotional state.
Nine-ending prices are defined here as prices set just below even dollar figures, such
as $1.99 rather than $2.00. Consumers read prices from left to right and thus are prone to
underestimate them (Coulter, 2001), which may affect the likelihood they will purchase a
product. Even though the widespread use of setting prices ending in the digit 9, some
evidences show that there is significant ambiguity in the effects of nine-ending prices
(Bizer and Schindler, 2005; Gedenk and Sattler, 1999). It is suggested that the influence of
nine-ending prices effect depends on two factors: the amount of attention that refer to
consumers pay to process price information accurately (Schindler and Warren, 1988;
Zaichkowsky, 1988) and perceiving nine-ending price information as monetary gain or
quality sacrifice of product (Stiving, 2000).