Pricing and monetization · 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
Junha Kim, Selin A. Malkoc, Joseph K. Goodman (2021). Just-Below Pricing Discourages Consumers to Upgrade. Journal of Consumer Research. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucab049
Plain-English take
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.
How much weight to give this
2/5 Evidence needs cautious interpretation
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.
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.
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.
Check comparison conditions and analysis in the paper.
Publisher record checked; full-text methods were not verified.
Double-blind? Blinding details were not established from the checked publisher page.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Evidence access
Publisher page; full-text availability varies and was not established.
Candidate study metadata and reported evidence were cross-checked against a direct publisher-page retrieval; the full article was 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.