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215
臺大管理論叢
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28
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1
期
The former factor of the amount of attention is likely to be affected by a variety of
factors such as consumer involvement, motivation, and the opportunity to process price
information, including emotion which has been largely ignored in the literature. In the
latter factor, emotional states also influences the cognition of nine-ending price
information in monetary gain or quality sacrifice because of cognition of events are
negatively influenced by negative emotions and positively influenced by positive
emotions (Chuang, 2007; Lin, Chuang, Kao, and Kung, 2006). Consumers in positive
emotion will view the nine-ending price as monetary gain with high purchase intention,
whereas those in negative emotion will view it as quality sacrifice of product with less
purchase intention (Stiving, 2000). Therefore, this study attempts to bridge the gap among
consumer’s emotion to pay attention to process price information accurately and the
cognition of monetary gain or quality sacrifice and their purchase intention for nine-
ending price information.
Additionally, emotional certainty also plays an important role in the study of
information processing (Tiedens and Linton, 2001). Certainty in one’s emotions gives
consumers a high level of processing fluency, whereas uncertainty in one’s emotions
induces a low level of processing fluency in consumers because one’s certainty appraisal
serves as an internal cue to signal whether further processing is necessary (Yen and
Chuang, 2008). Finally, in order to bridge the gap between nine-ending price effect in the
experiment and in the real world, separate and joint evaluations are utilized herein for
further analysis of this effect based on Hsee’s (1996) evaluability hypothesis. Previous
research results are based solely on the separate evaluation of nine-ending and zero-ending
prices, while whether the nine-ending pricing effect exists among other conditions remains
unknown.
The studies reported in this article therefore attempted to examine the role of emotion
in the nine-ending price effect as mediated by processing fluency. The major goal of this
paper was to improve our understanding of how valence-based emotional states influence
the effect of nine-ending prices under the mediating influence of processing fluency. In
Studies 1a, 1b, and 2, positive and negative emotions were manipulated to implement two
different induction techniques and explore the effect of emotions on nine-ending price
effects in two separate experiments. In Study 3, the appraisal tendency approach (Lerner
and Keltner, 2000; Yen and Chuang, 2008) was adopted to test the effects of certain
emotional states. Study 4 finally examined the nine-ending effect in the separate and joint
evaluations based on Hsee’s (1996) evaluability hypothesis.