IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/dicedp/333.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

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

Author

Listed:
  • Dertwinkel-Kalt, Markus
  • Köster, Mats
  • Sutter, Matthias

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Dertwinkel-Kalt, Markus & Köster, Mats & Sutter, Matthias, 2020. "To buy or not to buy? Price salience in an online shopping field experiment," DICE Discussion Papers 333, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE).
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:dicedp:333
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/215746/1/1694320871.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Goette, Lorenz & Tiefenbeck, Verena & Degen, Kathrin & Fleisch, Elgar & Tasic, Vojkan & Lalive, Rafael & Staake, Thorsten, 2016. "Overcoming Salience Bias: How Real-Time Feedback Fosters Resource Conservation," CEPR Discussion Papers 11480, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    2. Raj Chetty & Adam Looney & Kory Kroft, 2009. "Salience and Taxation: Theory and Evidence," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 99(4), pages 1145-1177, September.
    3. Botond Kőszegi & Matthew Rabin, 2006. "A Model of Reference-Dependent Preferences," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 121(4), pages 1133-1165.
    4. Dmitry Taubinsky & Alex Rees-Jones, 2018. "Attention Variation and Welfare: Theory and Evidence from a Tax Salience Experiment," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 85(4), pages 2462-2496.
    5. Kenan Kalaycı & Marta Serra-Garcia, 2016. "Complexity and biases," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 19(1), pages 31-50, March.
    6. Naomi E. Feldman & Bradley J. Ruffle, 2015. "The Impact of Including, Adding, and Subtracting a Tax on Demand," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 7(1), pages 95-118, February.
    7. Glenn Ellison & Sara Fisher Ellison, 2009. "Search, Obfuscation, and Price Elasticities on the Internet," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 77(2), pages 427-452, March.
    8. Hossain Tanjim & Morgan John, 2006. "...Plus Shipping and Handling: Revenue (Non) Equivalence in Field Experiments on eBay," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 6(2), pages 1-30, January.
    9. Amy Finkelstein, 2009. "E-ztax: Tax Salience and Tax Rates," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 124(3), pages 969-1010.
    10. Heidhues, Paul & Köszegi, Botond, 2018. "Behavioral Industrial Organization," CEPR Discussion Papers 12988, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    11. William Morrison & Dmitry Taubinsky, 2023. "Rules of Thumb and Attention Elasticities: Evidence from Under- and Overreaction to Taxes," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 105(5), pages 1110-1127, September.
    12. Naomi Feldman & Jacob Goldin & Tatiana Homonoff, 2018. "Raising the Stakes: Experimental Evidence on the Endogeneity of Taxpayer Mistakes," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 71(2), pages 201-230, June.
    13. Thomas Blake & Sarah Moshary & Kane Sweeney & Steven Tadelis, 2018. "Price Salience and Product Choice," NBER Working Papers 25186, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    14. Jennifer Brown & Tanjim Hossain & John Morgan, 2010. "Shrouded Attributes and Information Suppression: Evidence from the Field," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 125(2), pages 859-876.
    15. B. Douglas Bernheim & Dmitry Taubinsky, 2018. "Behavioral Public Economics," NBER Working Papers 24828, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Rhodes, Andrew, 2023. "A Survey on Drip Pricing and Other False Advertising," TSE Working Papers 23-1434, Toulouse School of Economics (TSE).
    2. Johannes Kasinger, 2024. "Shrouded Sin Taxes," Papers 2409.01493, arXiv.org.
    3. Xiaoguang Wang & Tao Lv & Lei Fan, 2022. "New Energy Vehicle Consumer Demand Mining Research Based on Fusion Topic Model: A Case in China," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(6), pages 1-13, March.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Markus Dertwinkel-Kalt & Mats Köster & Matthias Sutter, 2019. "To Buy or not to Buy? Shrouding and Partitioning of Prices in an Online Shopping Field Experiment," CESifo Working Paper Series 7475, CESifo.
    2. Tom Blake & Sarah Moshary & Kane Sweeney & Steve Tadelis, 2021. "Price Salience and Product Choice," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 40(4), pages 619-636, July.
    3. Kevin Ducbao Tran, 2020. "Partitioned Pricing and Consumer Welfare," Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin 1888, DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research.
    4. Xavier Gabaix, 2017. "Behavioral Inattention," NBER Working Papers 24096, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Sebastien Bradley & Naomi E. Feldman, 2020. "Hidden Baggage: Behavioral Responses to Changes in Airline Ticket Tax Disclosure," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 12(4), pages 58-87, November.
    6. Chioveanu, Ioana & Zhou, Jidong, 2009. "Price Competition and Consumer Confusion," MPRA Paper 17340, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    7. Lu, Kelin, 2022. "Overreaction to capital taxation in saving decisions," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 144(C).
    8. Ioana Chioveanu & Jidong Zhou, 2013. "Price Competition with Consumer Confusion," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 59(11), pages 2450-2469, November.
    9. Bennett Chiles, 2021. "Shrouded Prices and Firm Reputation: Evidence from the U.S. Hotel Industry," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 67(2), pages 964-983, February.
    10. Shelle Santana & Steven K. Dallas & Vicki G. Morwitz, 2020. "Consumer Reactions to Drip Pricing," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 39(1), pages 188-210, January.
    11. Sandro Ambuehl & B. Douglas Bernheim & Annamaria Lusardi, 2022. "Evaluating Deliberative Competence: A Simple Method with an Application to Financial Choice," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 112(11), pages 3584-3626, November.
    12. Nolan Ritter & Julia Anna Bingler, 2021. "Do homo sapiens know their prices? Insights on dysfunctional price mechanisms from a large field experiment," CER-ETH Economics working paper series 21/348, CER-ETH - Center of Economic Research (CER-ETH) at ETH Zurich.
    13. Naomi E. Feldman & Bradley J. Ruffle, 2012. "The impact of tax exclusive and inclusive prices on demand," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2012-50, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    14. Nicola Lacetera & Devin G. Pope & Justin R. Sydnor, 2012. "Heuristic Thinking and Limited Attention in the Car Market," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 102(5), pages 2206-2236, August.
    15. Gesche, Tobias, 2018. "Reference Price Shifts and Customer Antagonism: Evidence from Reviews for Online Auctions," VfS Annual Conference 2018 (Freiburg, Breisgau): Digital Economy 181650, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    16. Xavier Gabaix & David Laibson, 2018. "Shrouded attributes, consumer myopia and information suppression in competitive markets," Chapters, in: Victor J. Tremblay & Elizabeth Schroeder & Carol Horton Tremblay (ed.), Handbook of Behavioral Industrial Organization, chapter 3, pages 40-74, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    17. Emmanuel Farhi & Xavier Gabaix, 2020. "Optimal Taxation with Behavioral Agents," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 110(1), pages 298-336, January.
    18. Ernst Fehr & Keyu Wu, 2021. "Obfuscation in competitive markets," ECON - Working Papers 391, Department of Economics - University of Zurich, revised Feb 2023.
    19. Zemin (Zachary) Zhong, 2022. "Chasing Diamonds and Crowns: Consumer Limited Attention and Seller Response," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 68(6), pages 4380-4397, June.
    20. Johannes Voester & Bjoern Ivens & Alexander Leischnig, 2017. "Partitioned pricing: review of the literature and directions for further research," Review of Managerial Science, Springer, vol. 11(4), pages 879-931, October.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Salience; Inattention; Shrouding; Price partitioning; Field experiment;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
    • C93 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Field Experiments

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:zbw:dicedp:333. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/diduede.html .

    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.