Violations of procedure invariance—The case of preference reversals in monadic and competitive product evaluations

Müller, Holger, Eike B. Kroll and Bodo Vogt

Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 2012, vol. 19, issue 4, 406-412

Abstract: In this paper we investigate procedure invariance as a main axiom of the theory of rational choice that stipulates that the preference between options does not depend on the underlying elicitation method. In two experimental studies, we (1) elicit subjects’ preferences between options by means of the willingness to pay (WTP) for real products in a monadic evaluation (each product is assessed separately); and (2) compare the resulting preference order with the one obtained in a competitive evaluation entailing choices between equally priced products. We detect a significant number of systematic preference reversals, meaning that subjects who value products higher in the monadic design switch to other products in the competitive choice task. Although recent marketing literature on pricing research has focused mainly on monadic designs for eliciting willingness to pay for products, our results suggest that switching to a market-like environment where product choices are usually transacted in a competitive environment might create substantial preference reversals.

Keywords: Preference reversals; Procedure invariance; Willingness to pay; Monadic designs; Pricing research (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0969698912000446
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:joreco:v:19:y:2012:i:4:p:406-412

DOI: 10.1016/j.jretconser.2012.04.001

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services is currently edited by Harry Timmermans

More articles in Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().