Past research has demonstrated that consumers' price fairness judgments are influenced by comparisons between the offer price they receive and the prices paid by other consumers for the same product offering. In today's digital age, reference points for purchases are more prevalent than ever. However, investigations on how certain inputs of the transaction affect these judgments is lacking. Specifically, extant research has failed to account for how the purchase efforts of other consumers can influence one's own price fairness evaluations. Moreover, relatively little empirical research has endeavored to understand the simultaneous cognitive and affective processes that explain how consumers arrive at price fairness judgments. To address these gaps in the literature, we introduce two studies aimed at understanding the process through which the salient efforts of referent consumers serve to mitigate perceptions of price unfairness when two customers pay different prices for the same product. The findings support a dual‐process model whereby the efforts of other (referent) customers serve to simultaneously reduce buyer anger and increase buyer understanding of the price disparity, ultimately mitigating perceptions of price unfairness.

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Peer learning, a pedagogical approach whereby students are partnered together to have one student actively help another student learn predetermined content or skills, has long been utilized as an effective complement to more traditional instructional methods across a wide range of educational disciplines. This approach has been found to reduce the stress of learning, increase student engagement, and yield benefits to both the tutor and the tutee to a roughly equal degree. Yet, pedagogical research to this point has mostly failed to explore the usefulness of this approach to marketing and sales education. In the present research, we examine the effectiveness of peer-learning applications in a sales context and discuss marketing educators' implications. More specifically, we assess college sales students’ perceptions of peer-learning role-play exercise and further examine whether peer-learning exercises can improve students’ abilities. The results indicate that peer-learning exercises are not only enjoyed by students but are capable of producing objective performance improvement for both introductory and advanced students.