Pricing · Seven empirical studies, including a field study, compared just-below prices with round or just-above prices and measured upgrade choice, spending, perceived expensiveness, and price weighting; the paper reports field, lab, and incentive-compatible purchase designs.
Just-Below Pricing Discourages Consumers to Upgrade
Journal of Consumer Research · 2021
Summary
When the base product is priced at or just above a round-number threshold, consumers are more likely to upgrade and spend more. The proposed mechanism is that the upgrade is perceived as less expensive and consumers place less weight on price.
For your marketing
Possible founder application
Use this paper as evidence about just-below pricing discourages consumers to upgrade in the stated context; compare its population, treatment and outcome with your own decision.
Reported result
What the study found
When the base product is priced at or just above a round-number threshold, consumers are more likely to upgrade and spend more. The proposed mechanism is that the upgrade is perceived as less expensive and consumers place less weight on price.
Research question
What the authors investigated
What does just-below pricing discourages consumers to upgrade show about customer behavior or marketing outcomes?
Design
Seven empirical studies, including a field study, compared just-below prices with round or just-above prices and measured upgrade choice, spending, perceived expensiveness, and price weighting; the paper reports field, lab, and incentive-compatible purchase designs.
Sample and setting
Consumers across six product categories in laboratory studies plus a real-purchase field setting; the accessible full-text record explicitly reports a field study, six lab experiments, real purchase behavior, and a coffee/food field manipulation.
Scope and transfer
Limitations to keep in view
The authors note boundary conditions: just-below pricing can signal lower quality, and the paper cautions that its effectiveness is not universal. Inference: category and threshold manipulations may not generalize to every product or pricing context. 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.