In the past two decades, pricing research has paid increasing attention to instances where a product's price is divided into a base price and one or more mandatory surcharges, a practice termed partitioned pricing. Recently, partitioned pricing strategies in the marketplace have become more pervasive and complex, raising concerns that consumers do not always fully attend to or process all price information, and underestimate total prices, which in turn influences their purchasing behavior. Thus, understanding how partitioned prices affect consumers is of increasing interest to consumer researchers, public policy makers, and marketing managers. This paper reviews and organizes the academic literature on partitioned pricing and proposes an agenda for future research. We focus on the psychological processes underlying partitioned pricing, to help these three constituencies understand how partitioned pricing works, the mechanisms by which it exerts its impact, and the appropriate areas where the practice may need regulation to protect consumers.

Ample research shows that consumers accept influence from a source they identify with and reject influence from a source they wish to dissociate from. The current article moves beyond the well-established identification principle and delineates a new influence process. Influence via comparison-driven self-evaluation and restoration (CDSER) takes place when one observes a counterstereotypical product user and, as a result, questions one’s relative standing on the trait that the product symbolizes. In response to this threatening self-evaluation, the observer becomes more interested in the target product. To clearly distinguish CDSER from identification influence, the current investigation focuses on product users with a low socioeconomic status (SES). In contrast to the predictions of the identification principle, this article demonstrates that low-SES users can in some circumstances positively influence observers and increase their purchase intentions. The “low-status user effect” and the CDSER mechanism are demonstrated across multiple product categories in four studies.

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The recent COVID-19 pandemic poses a challenge to policy makers on how to make the population adhere to the social distancing and personal protection rules. The current research compares two ways by which tracking smartphone applications can be used to reduce the frequency of reckless behaviors that spread pandemics. The first involves the addition of alerts that increase the users’ benefit from responsible behavior. The second involves the addition of a rule enforcement mechanism that reduces the users’ benefit from reckless behavior. The effectiveness of the two additions is examined in an experimental study that focuses on an environment in which both additions are expected to be effective under the assumptions that the agents are expected-value maximizers, risk averse, behave in accordance with cumulative prospect theory (Tversky & Kahneman, 1992), or behave in accordance with the Cognitive Hierarchy model (Camerer, Ho & Chong, 2004). The results reveal a substantial advantage to the enforcement application. Indeed, the alerts addition was completely ineffective. The findings align with the small samples hypothesis, suggesting that decision makers tend to select the options that led to the best payoff in a small sample of similar past experiences. In the current context the tendency to rely on a small sample appears to be more consequential than other deviations from rational choice.

We show that counting downward while performing a task shortens the perceived duration of the task compared to counting upward. People perceive that less time has elapsed when they were counting downward versus upward while using a product (Studies 1 and 3) or watching geometrical shapes (Study 2). The counting direction effect is obtained using both prospective and retrospective time judgments (Study 3), but only when the count range begins with the number “1” (Study 2). Furthermore, the counting direction affects peoples' attitude toward the product, their likelihood of using it again, and their purchase intentions. We test several plausible accounts for the counting direction effect, including task difficulty, numerical anchoring, and arousal. We find preliminary evidence that downward counting feels shorter because it is more arousing than upward counting.