Catapano Rhia, Buttrick Nicholas, Widness Jane, Goldstein Robin, Santos Laurie R
Comparative Cognition Laboratory, Psychology Department, Yale University New Haven, CT, USA.
Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California at Davis Davis, CA, USA.
Front Psychol. 2014 Dec 2;5:1330. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01330. eCollection 2014.
Recent work in judgment and decision-making has shown that a good's price can have irrational effects on people's preferences. People tend to prefer goods that cost more money and assume that such expensive goods will be more effective, even in cases where the price of the good is itself arbitrary. Although much work has documented the existence of these pricing effects, unfortunately little work has addressed where these price effects come from in the first place. Here we use a comparative approach to distinguish between different accounts of this bias and to explore the origins of these effects. Specifically, we test whether brown capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) are also susceptible to pricing effects within the context of an experimentally trained token economy. Using a capuchin population previously trained in a token market, we explored whether monkeys used price as an indicator of value across four experiments. Although monkeys demonstrated an understanding of which goods had which prices (consistently shifting preferences to cheaper goods when prices were increased), we observed no evidence that such price information affected their valuation of different kinds of goods. These results suggest that human pricing effects may involve more sophisticated human-unique cognitive capacities, such as an understanding of market forces and signaling.
近期在判断与决策方面的研究表明，商品价格会对人们的偏好产生非理性影响。人们往往更喜欢价格更高的商品，并认为这类昂贵商品会更有效，即便商品价格本身是随意设定的。尽管已有大量研究记录了这些定价效应的存在，但遗憾的是，几乎没有研究探讨这些价格效应最初源自何处。在此，我们采用比较研究方法来区分对这种偏差的不同解释，并探究这些效应的根源。具体而言，我们测试了在经过实验训练的代币经济环境中，棕色卷尾猴（僧帽猴）是否也容易受到定价效应的影响。利用先前在代币市场接受过训练的一群卷尾猴，我们通过四项实验探究了猴子是否将价格作为价值指标。尽管猴子表现出对哪些商品对应哪些价格的理解（当价格提高时，偏好持续转向更便宜的商品），但我们没有观察到证据表明此类价格信息会影响它们对不同种类商品的估值。这些结果表明，人类的定价效应可能涉及更复杂的人类独有的认知能力，比如对市场力量和信号的理解。
