Robustness of Price Perception: How Strong are Anchoring, Left-Digit- and Framing-Effects when Promoting Sales Offers?

Abstract

While the large number of publications on behavioral pricing and partly spectacular results suggest that it is easily possible to influence parameters in the consumers´ price perception (for example, by providing price anchors as competitive prices, 99-price endings, information on a relative or absolute saving or information on availability of the prices by the suppliers), this empirical study based on experimental designs comes to a contrary conclusion: it turns out that the assessment of perceived value for money and cheapness for different sales promotion campaigns in Germany (train ticket, smartphone flat rate, filter coffee) is amazingly robust and that psychological factors tested in different experiments have a relatively low impact. The theoretical, practical and research implications of these findings are discussed.