IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/restat/v93y2011i1p193-200.html

The Flat-Rate Pricing Paradox: Conflicting Effects of "“All-You-Can-Eat"” Buffet Pricing

Author

Listed:
  • David R Just

    (Cornell University)

  • Brian Wansink

    (Cornell University)

Abstract

Are price and consumption independent in flat-rate price service contexts? A field experiment at an all-you-can-eat pizza restaurant shows that a 50%% discount on the price of the meal led customers to consume 27.9%% less pizza (2.95 versus 4.09 pieces). A second analysis indicated that individual taste ratings of this pizza tended to be inversely related to how much is consumed. One possible interpretation of these two findings is that individuals in a flat-rate (or fixed-price) context may consume the amount that enables them to get their money's worth rather than consuming until their marginal utility of consumption is 0. © 2011 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Suggested Citation

  • David R Just & Brian Wansink, 2011. "The Flat-Rate Pricing Paradox: Conflicting Effects of "“All-You-Can-Eat"” Buffet Pricing," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 93(1), pages 193-200, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:tpr:restat:v:93:y:2011:i:1:p:193-200
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/REST_a_00057
    File Function: link to full text
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tpr:restat:v:93:y:2011:i:1:p:193-200. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: The MIT Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://direct.mit.edu/journals .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.