In this chapter we review two distinct streams of literature, the numerical cognition literature and the judgment and decision making literature, to understand the psychological mechanisms that underlie consumers' responses to prices. The judgment and decision making literature identifies three...

Purchase intentions are routinely used to forecast sales of existing products and services. While past studies have shown that intentions are predictive of sales, they have only examined the absolute accuracy of intentions, not their accuracy relative to other forecasting methods. For example,...

Many firms divide a product's price into two mandatory parts, such as the base price of a mail-order shirt and the surcharge for shipping and handling, rather than charging a combined, all-inclusive price. The authors call this strategy partitioned pricing. Although firms presumably use...

Consumer research often fails to have broad impact on members of our own discipline, on adjacent disciplines studying related phenomena, and on relevant stakeholders who stand to benefit from the knowledge created by our rigorous research. We propose that impact is limited because consumer...

Choosing something improves a person's attitude toward it, a classic example of behavior affecting attitudes. Three studies re-examine the causal role of behavior in this “post-choice spreading of alternatives” phenomenon, demonstrating that neither the behavior of choosing nor the...

In one laboratory study and one field study conducted with a large, representative sample of respondents, we show that seemingly innocuous questions that precede a conjoint task, such as demographic and usage-related screening questions can alter the price sensitivities recovered fromthe main...

This research examines how consumers choose retailers when they are uncertain about store prices prior to shopping. Simulating everyday choice, participants made successive retailer choices where on each occasion they chose a retailer and only then learned product prices. The results of a series...

Past research has established that, while self-reports of purchase intentions can predict behavior, various factors affect the strength of the intentions-behavior link. This article explores one such factor: the impact of merely measuring intent. Our specific question concerns the impact of...

Help-seeking and help-giving have been investigated extensively in other areas, such as psychology, education, and child development, but have received relatively little attention in consumer behavior settings, where retailers often provide consumers with help. We draw from the extant literature...