Discounts and Consumer Search Behavior: The Role of Framing

For your marketing

Possible founder application

Use this paper as evidence about discounts and consumer search behavior: the role of framing in the stated context; compare its population, treatment and outcome with your own decision.

Reported result

What the study found

Participants based decisions on salient price-presentation characteristics rather than objective net-price information, demonstrating a pure framing effect of discounts on search behavior.

Research question

What the authors investigated

What does discounts and consumer search behavior: the role of framing show about customer behavior or marketing outcomes?

Design

A two-shop search experiment held net prices constant while varying whether shops posted net prices or gross prices with separate discount offers, and whether the first or second shop used the discount frame; search and purchase/shop choice were outcomes.

Sample and setting

Controlled two-shop search experiment with experimental subjects; the publisher abstract verifies the treatments and constant net prices but the accessible record does not expose the sample count.

Scope and transfer

Limitations to keep in view

Inference from the controlled two-shop design: real shopping includes more shops, richer information, heterogeneous products, and repeated purchase histories, so the magnitude of the framing effect may not transfer directly to field settings. Full-text methods and correction history were not independently checked.

Research sources

Candidate study metadata and reported evidence were cross-checked against a direct publisher-page retrieval; the full article was not independently reviewed.