How Price Tags Affect Willingness-To-Pay: Evidence from the Field (and Lab)
2011/05/10
研討會日期 : 2011-05-10
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Joseph Tao-yi Wang
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Joseph Tao-yi Wang got his Ph.D. in Economics from University of California, Los Angeles in 2005. He is currently serving as Associate Professor of Department of Economics at National Taiwan University. His research field is in economic theory and experimental economics.
演講摘要 : We investigate how posted prices affect consumers’ willingness-to-pay (WTP) for real-world products by eliciting the WTP from experienced consumers for water-resisting handbags and consumer electronics accessories before and after people see the price tag. To control for possible experimental artifacts, we elicit WTP with the following procedure: The incentive compatible Becker, DeGroot, Marschak (BDM) mechanism, explanations of the optimal strategy under BDM (truthfully revealing one's valuation), and paid practice rounds with subjects switching roles between buyers and sellers. Though this procedure has successfully minimized the willingness-to-pay and willingness-to accept gap in the literature (which we indeed replicate), we find a moderate but significant increase in WTP for the majority whose initial WTP were lower than the price tag, and a sharp decrease in WTP among the few whose initial WTP were higher than the price tag. This suggests a price effect driven by information regarding potential resale (and repurchase) opportunities. A similar laboratory experiment with college students replicates these findings. This suggests that when firms determine prices or discounts, they might have to care more about the negative “outside-opportunity” effect of low prices instead of the positive “price placebo” effect commonly observed in more controlled environments.
