Can consumers learn price dispersion? Evidence for dispersion spillover across categories
Publication type
FT ranked journal articlePublication Year
2022Journal
Journal of Consumer ResearchPublication Volume
48Publication Issue
5Publication Begin page
756Publication End page
774
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Price knowledge is a key antecedent of many consumer judgments and decisions. This article examines consumers' ability to form accurate beliefs about the minimum, the maximum, and the overall variability of prices for multiple product categories. Eight experiments provide evidence for a novel phenomenon we call dispersion spillover : Consumers tend to overestimate price dispersion in a category after encountering another category in which prices are more dispersed (vs. equally or less dispersed). Our experiments show that this dispersion spillover is consequential: It influences the likelihood that consumers will search for (and find) better prices and offers, and how much consumers bid in auctions. Finally, we disentangle two cognitive processes that might underlie dispersion spillover. Our results suggest that judgments of dispersion are not only based on specific prices stored in memory and that dispersion spillover does not simply reflect the inappropriate activation of prices from other categories. Instead, it appears that consumers also form "intuitive statistics" of dispersion: Summary representations that encode the dispersion of prices in the environment but that are insufficiently category specificKeyword
Consumers, Price Regulation, Shadow Prices, Wage Differentials, Auctions, Behavioral Pricing, Consumer Learning, Intuitive Statistics, Mental Representation, Numerical Cognition, Price Dispersion, Price Knowledge, Price Search, Reference PriceKnowledge Domain/Industry
Marketing & Salesae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1093/jcr/ucab030
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