Promotional Bundles and Consumers' Price Judgments: When the Best Things in Life Are Not Free

Michael A. Kamins, Valerie S. Folkes and Alexander Fedorikhin

Journal of Consumer Research, 2009, vol. 36, issue 4, 660-670

Abstract: A series of experiments examined the amount that consumers were willing to pay for products bundled together in a promotion. Describing one of the disparate products in the bundle as "free" decreased the price consumers were willing to pay for each product when sold individually. However, a "freebie" offer did not influence the overall price for the bundle of disparate products, a finding robust across two different settings and populations. The differential effect of freebies is explained by varying judgment difficulty, with the price being easier to arrive at for just a single product than for the combination. Consistent with this explanation, factors that influence judgment difficulty (the salience of the company's motive for offering the freebie and time pressure to make a judgment) moderated the effects of a free offer on the amount consumers were willing to pay. (c) 2009 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/599806 link to full text (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:oup:jconrs:v:36:y:2009:i:4:p:660-670

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 ().