*When: April 12, Thu, 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM
*Where: MH 230
Sweta Thota and Ricardo Villarreal
Title: Prevalence of Relative Thinking on the Internet
Abstract:
Consider
the following scenarios: Situation 1: a consumer who is planning the
purchase of a 55”3D LED TV priced at $1999 in a store meets a friend in
the store who tells her that the same TV is available for a $20
discount at another store located 20 minutes away; Situation 2: a
consumer who is planning to purchase a 26” LCD TV for $150 in a store
is informed by a friend that the same TV is available for a discounted
price of $130 at another located 20 minutes away. Is the consumer in
Situation 1 as likely to travel to the other store away as the consumer
in Situation 2?
Most consumers might choose to take the
additional 20 minute travel effort to save $20 only on the TV priced at
$150. The model of rational choice in traditional economic theories
advocates that the price difference which guides the extra travel and
effort should be the same regardless of the original price of the good
because the additional cost of incurring an extra 20 minute travel is
the same regardless of the good’s price (Azar 2007). However, consumers
behave as though their search costs in terms of time and money increase
proportionately to price of the purchase item. Consequently, consumers
systematically violate this model and opt to exercise the additional
effort only when the saving relative to the price of the original good
is higher i.e., when the original price of the good is lower. This
phenomenon is called relative thinking.
Past research has shown
that relative thinking is instrumental in retailing and pricing areas.
Further, given our limited cognitive abilities, individuals utilize
several choice heuristics (ingrained into our decision-making system)
which often provided reasonably accurate solutions with minimal amount
of effort (Todd, 2000). Since it is widely acknowledged that human
beings are cognitive misers (Fiske and Taylor 1991), it is not
surprising that even with our contemporary and rational decision-making
abilities, we still rely on heuristics which could often lead to biased
decision outcomes. Relative thinking is a heuristic that leads to a
decision bias because a saving of $20 should be equally valuable to a
consumer regardless of whether the original price of an item is $50,
$100 or $1000. Now consider the above two situations in the context of
a consumer considering the purchase of the earlier mentioned 51” TV
(priced at $1999) vs. the 26” TV (priced at $150) on the Internet. Is a
consumer equally likely to browse other web sites for a twenty dollar
saving ? That is, do individuals perceive the attractiveness of saving
an ‘x’ amount on a low vs. high priced item similarly across the
internet and brick and mortar stores? Specifically, does relative
thinking phenomenon hold in the context of internet based search for
lower prices?
This paper highlights boundary conditions and
hypothesizes and investigates the relative thinking phenomenon in the
context of Internet. Results show that the internet sets boundary
conditions for the relative thinking phenomenon.
