To buy or not to buy? Price salience in an online shopping field experiment

Markus Dertwinkel-Kalt (), Mats Köster and Matthias Sutter

No 333, DICE Discussion Papers from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE)

Abstract: We examine whether shrouding or partitioning of a surcharge raises demand in online shopping. In a field experiment with more than 34,000 consumers, we find that consumers in the online shop of a cinema initiate a purchase process for a 3D movie more often when the 3D surcharge is shrouded, but they also drop out more often when the overall price is shown at the check-out. In sum, the demand distribution is independent of the price presentation. This result qualifies previous findings on the effectiveness of shrouding surcharges and can be rationalized through low cancellation costs.

Keywords: Salience; Inattention; Shrouding; Price partitioning; Field experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-pay
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/215746/1/1694320871.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: To buy or not to buy? Price salience in an online shopping field experiment (2020)
Working Paper: To Buy or Not to Buy? Price Salience in an Online Shopping Field Experiment (2020)
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:zbw:dicedp:333

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in DICE Discussion Papers from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().