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消費者情緒在九尾數定價效果的影響
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Emotion can assist in making optimal decisions (Elster, 1998). The literature on
emotion and information processing has revealed that positive and negative emotions have
asymmetric effects. From a neurobiological viewpoint, emotion facilitates optimal-choice
behavior when individual is provided with several courses of action. That is, positive
feelings can make it easier to access information in the brain, improve problem solving,
enhance negotiation, and build efficient and thorough decision making (Rolls, 1999).
Positive affect can influence social behavior (Isen, 1987). Positive mood allows
individuals to better organize and assimilate information and facilitates creative problem
solving. Ashby, Isen, and Turken (1999) argue that a positive mood enhances individual
performance on many cognitive tasks. People’s thoughts are made up of images which are
marked by positive or negative feelings that are linked to bodily states (pleasant or
unpleasant) (Ackert, Church, and Deaves, 2003).
Besides, cognitive effort plays an important role in most explanations of the nine-
ending price effect, which assume that heuristic process involving mental effort occurs
during the price evaluation process. Schindler and Warren (1988) found the effect of nine-
ending prices depends on the amount of attention the consumer pays to the purchase
decision. Some studies have concluded that people are more likely to rely on a simplified
leftmost-heuristic to judge nine-ending prices under a high cognitive load (Stiving and
Winer, 1997; Coulter, 2001; Schindler and Chandrashekaran, 2004).
Studies of cognitive effort have made a contribution to the literature by identifying
the importance of processing fluency for nine-ending prices. Mazzoni and Nelson (1998)
found the fluency of processing can be perceived via an internal meta-cognitive feedback
mechanism (Metcalfe and Shimamura, 1994). This feedback mechanism may deem
processing fluency to be a signal to other processing modules including the emotion
system (Fernandez-Duque, Baird, and Posner, 2000).
Cognitive processes may mediate the effect of feelings on social behavior (Isen,
1987). The mediating role of processing fluency in both the level effect and the image
effect can therefore be summarized as follows: consumers experiencing positive emotions
are expected to have greater purchase intention than those experiencing negative emotions
because positive emotions result in a higher degree of processing fluency than do negative
emotions. I then proposed the following hypotheses on the basis of the foregoing
discussion.
H1: Nine-ending prices will trigger a greater purchase intention than zero-ending
prices among people in a positive emotional state, compared to those in a
negative emotional state.