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perception of price. Thomas and Morwitz (2005) suggested consumers do not notice slight
price changes, and other studies have shown that consumers perceive prices with a lower
left digit as significantly lower prices than those with the same left digit (e.g., $6 or $5.99
versus $5.60 or $5.59). The left-digit effect refers to the “observation that using a nine
ending versus a zero ending, for example, $2.99 versus $3.00, changes the leftmost digit”
(Thomas and Morwitz, 2005). Dehaene (1993) pointed out that numbers extend from left
to right. Given this left-right orientation (Coulter, 2001), the leftmost digit is the first
number consumers read. If the number order were reversed, then the left-right orientation
would presumably disappear (Coulter, 2001). We therefore examined whether emotion
moderates the nine-ending price effect when the leftmost digit changes to a lower number.
A further prediction made in Study 1b was that consumers experiencing positive emotions
process pricing information with a high level of fluency and are more likely to read prices
from left to right when a nine-ending price changing the leftmost digit is used. That is,
consumers experiencing a positive emotion are more likely to perceive nine-ending prices
as lower prices than prices one cent higher when the leftmost digit changes to a lower
number (e.g., $5.00 versus $4.99) relative to consumers experiencing a negative emotion
inducing a low level of processing fluency.
Second, it is possible that the effect of incidental affect is primarily caused by the
involuntary reaction of participants to stimuli rather than by objective evaluation (Forgas
and Ciarrochi, 2001). For example, the recollection of positive or negative events used to
induce incidental affect may produce self-enhancing motivations in participants, in
addition to inducing affective change (Sedikides, 1995). To show that the nine-ending
price effect is affected by emotion rather than by other variables, Study 1b therefore tested
the hypothesis by employing an emotion induction method that was different from the
method used in Study 1a and had been employed successfully by Forgas and Ciarrochi
(2001) and Adaval (2003) to elicit the expected emotions. This approach has been applied
in other studies to triangulate emotional effects (Forgas, 1995) because most emotion
induction methods tend to have unintended cognitive and motivational consequences. It
was desirable to use different procedures in a series of related experiments to establish that
the observed effects were due to emotion and were not attributable to other variables.
Participants
The sample comprised 240 undergraduate university students (141 females and 99
males with a mean age of 21.3 years and aged between 17 and 24) recruited from a large
southern university.