Institute for Management Research, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands.
Faculty Society and Economics, Rhein-Waal University of Applied Sciences, Kleve, Germany.
PLoS One. 2022 Aug 18;17(8):e0270850. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0270850. eCollection 2022.
Retail store prices are frequently set to either a just-below (e.g., $1.99) or rounded to (e.g., $2.00) integer levels. Previous studies proposed two price-perception effects that may underly such psychological pricing strategies. First, the left-digit effect (LDE) assumes consumers read prices left-to-right. Cognitive limitations let consumers overweight the impact of digits on the left side of the price while underweighting digits on the right side of the price. This effect appears to conflict with the contradictory perceptual fluency effect (PFE), which proposes that a rounded price is more perceptual fluent and, thus, more attractive to consumers. To address these paradoxical effects, we conducted an online experiment with 266 participants making a total of 4788 purchasing decisions where we systematically varied the purchasing prices of otherwise identical lottery tickets across two price levels. Against expectations, we found no support for either of the two price-perception effects. We propose three possible explanations of these null results.
零售商店的价格经常设定为接近整数的水平（例如，$1.99）或四舍五入到整数（例如，$2.00）。之前的研究提出了两种可能是这种心理定价策略基础的价格感知效应。首先，左位数效应（LDE）假设消费者从左到右读取价格。认知限制使消费者对价格左侧的数字的影响权重过高，而对价格右侧的数字的影响权重过低。这种效应似乎与矛盾的感知流畅效应（PFE）相冲突，后者认为，一个四舍五入的价格更具有感知流畅性，因此对消费者更有吸引力。为了解决这些矛盾的效应，我们进行了一项有 266 名参与者的在线实验，总共进行了 4788 次购买决策，我们在两个价格水平上系统地改变了 otherwise identical 彩票的购买价格。出乎意料的是，我们没有发现这两种价格感知效应中的任何一种得到支持。我们提出了对这些零结果的三种可能解释。
