Purpose
This paper aims to investigate consumer behaviour in response to social norms under pay-what-you-want (PWYW) pricing. Specifically, it explores the critical role of social norms such as norm priming and consumer prior trust in the retailer on consumers’ perceived price fairness, trust, willingness to pay, purchase intentions and intentions to spread negative word of mouth about the retailer.
Design/methodology/approach
Data on dependent measures were collected through the scenario-based online experimental approach and assessed using MANOVA analysis.
Findings
Results confirm the significance of norms by indicating the critical role of norm belief on consumer responses. Also, increasing the salience of norms by priming them usually intensifies negative behaviour, and pre-existing trust in the retailer serves as an imperfect cushion against consumer negative reactions to norm violation, but this effect is observed to be decreasing with increase in prior trust.
Research limitations/implications
Further research should consider the contextual (time, place, media) influences and assumptions to increase the generalizability of the findings.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to explicitly examine the effects of social-norm compliance by sellers on consumer behaviour in the context of PWYW pricing.
PurposePay what you want (PWYW) is a participative pricing mechanism that permits customers complete freedom to choose prices. PWYW literature reports the influence of external reference price (ERP) on customers' price decisions and payments. The current research examines the influence of ERP presence, salience and understanding at the seller level by analysing customers' perceptions of seller price image dimensions and purchase intentions.Design/methodology/approachStudy 1 tests the impact of ERP presence and salience in controlled lab settings while Study 2 takes this investigation further by including the moderating effect of ERP understanding on seller price image dimensions and purchase intentions in online settings.FindingsResults illustrate the positive impact of ERP presence on all seller price image dimensions excluding the perceived price level. Perceived price fairness mediates the impact of ERP presence on perceived value. ERP salience positively impacts price processability. ERP presence and salience attached to it positively impact customers' purchase intentions through seller price image dimensions.Originality/valueThis is possibly the first paper to investigate the ERP effect on seller price image dimensions in a PWYW context that lacks fixed posted prices.
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