You Get What You Pay For? Self-Construal Influences Price-Quality Judgments

Ashok K. Lalwani and Sharon Shavitt

Journal of Consumer Research, 2013, vol. 40, issue 2, 255 - 267

Abstract: How does cultural self-construal influence consumers' tendency to use price to judge quality? Seven experiments designed to address this question revealed that people with a more interdependent (vs. independent) cultural self-construal--operationalized by ethnicity, nationality, measured self-construal, or manipulated salient self-construal--have a greater tendency to use price information to judge quality. This difference arises because interdependents tend to be holistic (vs. analytic) thinkers who are more likely to perceive interrelations between the elements of a product. These effects were observed regardless of whether the price-quality relation was assessed with a standard self-report scale or via actual product judgments, and whether thinking style was measured or manipulated. However, cultural differences only emerged in situations that afforded interdependents (vs. independents) a relational processing advantage. These findings shed light on the mechanisms underlying the effects and identify novel boundary conditions for the influence of self-construal and thinking style on consumer judgments.

Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (36)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/670034 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/670034 (text/html)

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:oup:jconrs:doi:10.1086/670034

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Consumer Research is currently edited by Bernd Schmitt, June Cotte, Markus Giesler, Andrew Stephen and Stacy Wood

More articles in Journal of Consumer Research from Journal of Consumer Research Inc.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().