Pricing and monetization · Two large-scale field studies in an insurance company's car-insurance and property-insurance branches, plus a laboratory experiment testing the proposed psychological mechanism.
Relational Price Discounts: Consumers' Metacognitions and Nonlinear Effects of Initial Discounts on Customer Retention
M. J. del Rio Olivares, Kristina Wittkowski, Jaakko Aspara, Tomas Falk, Pekka Mattila (2018). Relational Price Discounts: Consumers' Metacognitions and Nonlinear Effects of Initial Discounts on Customer Retention. Journal of Marketing. https://doi.org/10.1509/jm.16.0267
Plain-English take
Initial discounts had a nonlinear association with retention: moderate discounts of 5%–35% were positive, while discounts below 5% and above 35% were negative. Relative to low and high discounts, moderate discounts produced higher expectations of future relational benefits and lower expectations of future discounts.
How much weight to give this
3/5 Empirical study with design limits
The 1–5 evidence-check score is a practical reading aid, not a formal peer review or a probability that a conclusion is true. It combines design strength (2 points), sample reporting (1), comparison/control clarity (1), and how much of the paper could be checked (1). Access affects how confidently this directory can assess a study, not the study's underlying quality. Blinding is reported separately because it is not relevant to every design.
Two large-scale field studies in an insurance company's car-insurance and property-insurance branches, plus a laboratory experiment testing the proposed psychological mechanism.
Customers in the two insurance-branch field studies, plus laboratory-experiment participants; the accessible publisher abstract does not report counts.
See the full paper for comparison conditions and analysis.
Publisher page checked; full-text methods not independently reviewed.
Double-blind? Blinding was not established from the checked publisher page.
Research question
What the authors investigated
What does relational price discounts: consumers' metacognitions and nonlinear effects of initial discounts on customer retention show about customer decisions or business outcomes?
Design
Two large-scale field studies in an insurance company's car-insurance and property-insurance branches, plus a laboratory experiment testing the proposed psychological mechanism.
Sample and setting
Customers in the two insurance-branch field studies, plus laboratory-experiment participants; the accessible publisher abstract does not report counts.
Reported result
What the study found
Initial discounts had a nonlinear association with retention: moderate discounts of 5%–35% were positive, while discounts below 5% and above 35% were negative. Relative to low and high discounts, moderate discounts produced higher expectations of future relational benefits and lower expectations of future discounts.
This is a paraphrase of the source. Check the original paper for definitions, estimates, statistical uncertainty and analysis details.
Scope and transfer
Limitations to keep in view
The accessible official abstract does not enumerate limitations. Full article methods and correction history were not independently reviewed.
Possible founder application
Use this study as a bounded example of relational price discounts: consumers' metacognitions and nonlinear effects of initial discounts on customer retention; assess whether its population, intervention and outcome match your own decision.
Evidence access
Publisher article page; full-text access varies and was not established in this check.
Publisher page directly retrieved; candidate metadata and reported result checked against that page. Full methods were not independently reviewed.
If only an abstract or metadata was available, the profile is limited to claims supported there. A paper's paywall does not change its evidentiary status, but it limits what we can substantiate from accessible text.