Kent Monroe

University of Richmond | UR · Department of Marketing

Purpose This paper aims to examine how customer heterogeneity influences absolute price thresholds in a service industry. Design/methodology/approach Customer purchase behavior is studied in the context of a firm’s and competitor’s price changes. Customer purchase behavior is further examined in the context of specific customer attributes such as...

Generally, discounting prices increases unit sales but decreases profit margins. If presenting a discount more attractively, will profits increase with sales? We tested discounts presented to customers in euros or percentages at three regular price levels (low, medium, or high). Store visitors were surveyed to determine the discount that would make...

Building a foundation of marketing theory requires developing effective ways to aggregate research results. Meta-analyses that accumulate knowledge within a research domain is an important means for summarizing research findings and increasingly is being conducted in various substantive marketing domains. Moderator analysis and structural models us...

Purpose This paper aims to examine the effect of targeted promotions on perceptions of fairness from the perspective of consumers who are not targeted. Design/methodology/approach A scenario-based approach is used. Three studies manipulating promotion selectivity and various bases for promotion selection were conducted. A total of 403 people par...

Despite a good general understanding of retail patronage behavior, knowledge related to the deeper meanings of shopping is still uncertain. Using phenomenological depth interviews, the authors of this study examine lived shopping experiences. The findings contribute to the theory on shopping by revealing that shopping helps define participants' ind...

Business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) markets differ in many ways as documented in the contemporary marketing literature. However, many behavioral characteristics of human beings – particularly those related to judgment and decision-making – are present across diverse contexts. From this insight, we derive a proposition: many be...

Marketers frequently use promotions to enhance sales and increase consumers’ perceptions of value. However, most promotions usually come with restrictions, such as time expiration, quantity or product model restriction, etc. In the present research, the effect of the stage in the purchase process when the consumer finds out about the restriction is...

In consumer research on brand extension evaluations, it has been established that parent brand attitudes could be transferred to extensions as long as the perceived fit is high between the parent brand and the extension product. Adding to this finding, we examined how parent brand attitudes and incoming attribute information of the extension produc...

Composite branding extensions, wherein two existing brands ally themselves to create a composite brand name and enter a different product category, have become a common way to introduce a new product. An important managerial issue is deciding how to position the two brand names within the expression to communicate this alliance to consumers. Drawin...

How do buyers judge prices? How do they know whether a product or service is priced reasonably, is a good deal or is too expensive? Do buyers perceive all price increases and all price promotions? Do price promotions and price increases necessarily change buyer behavior? How do buyers process the plethora of price information they encounter each da...

The authors reflect on the commentators’ comments and add some additional thoughts about the current state of behavioral price research.

To present the process of transcultural adaptation of the Richmond Compulsive Buying Scale to Brazilian Portuguese. For the semantic adaptation step, the scale was translated to Portuguese and then back-translated to English by two professional translators and one psychologist, without any communication between them. The scale was then applied to 2...

Numbers and prices can be processed and encoded in three different forms: 1) visual [based on their written form in Arabic numerals (e.g., 72)], 2) verbal [based on spoken word-sounds (e.g., “seventy” and “two”), and 3) analog (based on judgments of relative “size” or amount (e.g., more than 70 but less than 80)]. In this paper, we demonstrate that...

This chapter summarizes the behavioral pricing research findings of price and how buyers respond to price. This includes the relationship between price and perceived value and the decision heuristics that help us understand how price influences perceptions of value and eventual product choice. Buyers also use price as an indicator of product qualit...

This chapter traces the development of the pricing research program of Kent Monroe, beginning with his doctoral dissertation and continuing to the present time. Drawing on psychophysics and adaptation-level theory the early research efforts concentrated on validating two important concepts relative to behavioral pricing research: reference price an...

Purpose This paper aims to link conceptually the concepts of price fairness and customer satisfaction and empirically demonstrate the influence of perceived price fairness on satisfaction judgments. Further, it seeks to examine specific factors that influence fairness perceptions including price perception and consumer vulnerability. Design/method...

Recent news coverage on pricing portrays the importance of price fairness. This article conceptually integrates the theoretical foundations of fairness perceptions and summarizes empirical findings on price fairness. The authors identify research issues and gaps in existing knowledge on buyers' perceptions of price fairness. The article con-cludes...

A traditional assumption concerning how prices influence buyers’ purchasing behaviors has been that buyers know the prices of the products and services that they consider for purchase. However, empirical research during the past four decades repeatedly has discovered that buyers often are not able to remember the prices of items they had recently p...

In this article, the author briefly reviews four substantive issues in the analysis of the effects of the proposed merger of office superstores Staples and Office Depot. One apparent issue in FTC v. Staples was the availability of relevant information to support the claims of the merging firms and the appropriate methods of analyzing the informatio...

Multinational companies marketing their undifferentiated products to different countries unintentionally may create a problem for themselves. A low price in one country may encourage an enterprise to transship the products to another country with higher price, creating a new channel of parallel imports that competes with the authorized channels the...

The authors expand and integrate prior price-perceived value models within the context of price comparison advertising. More specifically, the conceptual model explicates the effects of advertised selling and reference prices on buyers' internal reference prices, perceptions of quality, acquisition value, transaction value, and purchase and search...

Although bundling, the selling of two or more products and/or services at a single price, has a history of economic research, marketing-oriented investigations have appeared only recently. This paper examines buyers' perceptions of overall savings when they evaluate a bundle offer. Such perceptions of overall bundle savings may consist of two separ...

Although bundling, the selling of two or more products and/or services at a single price, has a history of economic research, marketing-oriented investigations have appeared only recently. This paper examines buyers’ perceptions of overall savings when they evaluate a bundle offer. Such perceptions of overall bundle savings may consist of two separ...

The authors report a study of the effects of price, brand, and store information on buyers' perceptions of product quality and value, as well as their willingness to buy. Hypotheses are derived from a conceptual model positing the effects of extrinsic cues (price, brand name, and store name) on buyers' perceptions and purchase intentions. Moreover,...

Despite over 30 years of empirical investigations, it remains unclear whether (1) there is an actual positive relationship between price and product quality, and (2) whether buyers perceive a positive relationship between price and product quality. Although there has been a plethora of studies on the relationship, there is little agreement on what...

Foot in the door and door in the face have been cited frequently as effective strategies for gaining compliance with behavioral requests. However, research efforts to confirm these two phenomena have produced mixed results. After deriving predictions about how the favorability of available information influences compliance, the authors report a syn...

The authors analyze the issue of comparative price advertising from a behavioral perspective. Because public policy recognizes that comparative pricing may lead to consumer misperceptions, the authors review the regulatory setting and pose several research questions that need to be addressed. A complex experiment and replication examining some of t...

This paper discusses the inadequacy of the gross margin criterion for pricing a product line during times of resource scarcity. A decision criterion called the contribution-per-resource unit is developed and applied when a firm desires to maintain the product line's current prices. A pricing and product-mix determination procedure is illustrated fo...

Marketing researchers recently have expended considerable effort to investigate how price influences buyers' decisions yielding a variety of results, some not entirely explainable. This article reviews the relevant research literature, organizes the results, and suggests new research directions.

Does unit-price information alter purchase decisions of consumers in supermarkets? Will the change to a unit-pricing system create burdensome costs for retailers? The authors report the results of unit-pricing experiments and assess the benefits of unit pricing.

Does unit-price information alter purchase decisions of consumers in supermarkets? Will the change to a unit-pricing system create burdensome costs for retailers? The authors report the results of unit-pricing experiments and assess the benefits of unit pricing.

This article reports the adaptation of an experimental technique for establishing response scales for product classes. Experimental results further validate the price-limit hypothesis first confirmed in Europe. Implications for demand estimation, new product pricing, and product line pricing are discussed.