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Are Consumers Fooled by Discounts? An Experimental Test in a Consumer Search Environment *
Author(s) -
BAYER RALPHC.,
KE CHANGXIA
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
economic record
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.365
H-Index - 42
eISSN - 1475-4932
pISSN - 0013-0249
DOI - 10.1111/j.1475-4932.2011.00724.x
Subject(s) - task (project management) , economics , price dispersion , search cost , baseline (sea) , microeconomics , econometrics , test (biology) , linear search , advertising , business , computer science , algorithm , paleontology , oceanography , management , biology , geology
In this article, we investigate experimentally whether people search optimally and how price promotions influence search behaviour. We implement a sequential search task with exogenous price dispersion in a baseline treatment and introduce discounts in two experimental treatments. We find that search behaviour is roughly consistent with optimal search but also observe some discount biases. If subjects do not know in advance where discounts are offered, the purchase probability is increased by 19 percentage points in shops with discounts, even after controlling for the benefit of the discount and for risk preferences. If consumers know in advance where discounts are given, then the bias is only weakly significant and much smaller (7 percentage points).