Advance payment systems: Paying too much today and being satisfied tomorrow

Fabian Schulz, Christian Schlereth, Nina Mazar and Bernd Skiera

International Journal of Research in Marketing, 2015, vol. 32, issue 3, 238-250

Abstract: Advance payment systems represent a pricing innovation, in which companies predict customers' future consumption for the following year and then bill a series of monthly, uniform advance payments. Any difference between predicted and actual consumption gets settled at the end of the year with a refund or extra payment. Companies thus gain earlier access to funds and lower risk of customer defaults; customers benefit from predictable monthly payments. However, customers' reactions to a refund or extra payment sequence in an advance payment system remain unclear. Three theoretical lenses offer predictions about customers' advance payment system preferences: prospect theory, with a focus on silver lining and hedonic editing principles; mental accounting; and the value of sequences. Using three empirical studies with survey and billing data of more than 20,000 customers to examine their reactions to refunds and extra payments, this paper reveals that receiving a refund reduces customers' price awareness, increases their recommendation likelihood, and reduces churn and tariff switching, as long as the refund is not too high. The findings illustrate both the consequences and the boundary conditions of the silver lining principle with large-scale field studies.

Keywords: Innovation; Pricing; Satisfaction; Payment sequence preferences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167811615000397
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ijrema:v:32:y:2015:i:3:p:238-250

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijresmar.2015.03.003

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Research in Marketing is currently edited by Roland Rust

More articles in International Journal of Research in Marketing from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().