Turning unplanned overpayment into a status signal: how mentioning the price paid repairs satisfaction

Aaron M. Garvey (), Simon Blanchard and Karen Page Winterich ()
Additional contact information
Aaron M. Garvey: University of Kentucky
Karen Page Winterich: The Pennsylvania State University

Marketing Letters, 2017, vol. 28, issue 1, No 6, 83 pages

Abstract: Abstract We investigate how mentioning the price paid to others (which we refer to as price-dropping) can be used to assuage the negative experience that occurs when consumers realize they unintentionally overpaid for a product. Specifically, we show that by engaging in price-dropping, consumers re-appropriate the overpayment into a conspicuous consumption signal that improves their satisfaction. Two studies demonstrate that the effect of price-dropping is mitigated when consumers who overpaid have low sensitivity to status cues, and also when the audience of the price-drop is unreceptive to status cues. We discuss how price-dropping has implications for retailer pricing policies and customer experience, along with avenues for future research.

Keywords: Conspicuous consumption; Pricing; Overpayment; Status; Satisfaction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11002-015-9383-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:mktlet:v:28:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1007_s11002-015-9383-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... etailsPage=societies

DOI: 10.1007/s11002-015-9383-9

Access Statistics for this article

Marketing Letters is currently edited by Joel Steckel and Peter Golder

More articles in Marketing Letters from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().