Are organizational buyers rational? Using price heuristics in functional risk judgment

Revisiting the paradox of whether retail buyers behave more like consumers or industrial purchasers: the case of price discounts

“…The price discount may also lead some retail buyers to question the marketing skills of the manufacturer and the credibility of the manufacturer's claims overall. As additional evidence of the industrial buyer resemblance argument (Saab and Botelho 2020), the field experiment also indicated no significant interaction effect between the price discount and peripheral advertising cues. If retail buyers' behavior rather resembled that of consumers, a positive interaction effect could have been expected between the different cues (see for example Gunden et al 2020).…”

“…In particular, the perceived role of pricing as an economic cost versus a signal of quality (e.g., Monroe and Krishnan 1985;Völckner and Hofmann 2007;Zeithaml 1988) may differ substantially depending on the perspectiveand so may, by extension, the role of price discounts: whether more weight is put on the economic savings that discounts yield, or the question marks about product quality that discounts may raise. Previously, mixed findings have been obtained about the effect of price discounts on quality perceptions of both consumers (see for example Zheng et al 2021;Grewal et al 1998;Lee and Chen-Yu 2018) and industrial buyers (Saab and Botelho 2020)-indeed ranging from positive effects (e.g., Huang et al 2014) to negative ones (e.g., Garretson and Clow 1999).…”

Exploring the Relationship Between Visual Aesthetics and Social Commerce Through Visual Information Adoption Unimodel

“…In addition, we introduce a VIAUM for the first time to explore the underlying mechanism through which visual aesthetics affects social commerce intention. By highlighting the prominent role of visual heuristics, VIAUM provides a practical and flexible framework to understand the persuasive process of contextual information in the digital world (Gigerenzer and Gaissmaier, 2011 ; Saab and Botelho, 2020 ). Previous studies generally held a principle that central arguments usually override the judgmental influences of visual heuristics.…”

“…Besides, visual presentations are verified to be more memorable and more directly connected to meaning than verbal depiction (Townsend and Kahn, 2014 ; Marwick, 2015 ; Jin and Ryu, 2019 ). In addition, following the principle of “bounded rationality” (Simon, 1955 ), several academics indicate a “less is more” effect of simple heuristics in which heuristics is more accurate than rational models (Wübben and Wangenheim, 2008 ; Gigerenzer and Gaissmaier, 2011 ; Saab and Botelho, 2020 ). Visual heuristics, thus, refers to methods that make use of salient visual cues for more accessible, quicker, and/or more accurate decision-making than complex approaches (e.g., the systematic mode in ELM and the central route in HSM, Kruglanski and Thompson, 1999 ; Gigerenzer and Gaissmaier, 2011 ; Saab and Botelho, 2020 ).…”

Industrial relationships

“…A recent study (Saab and Botelho, 2019) demonstrates that an overpriced material or product could lead business decisionmakers to judge such a product as less prone to functional failures. Unexpectedly, the authors report that this is especially true regarding product features that can be verified before purchase through inspection or accessible sources rather than, as expected, for products that require the evaluation of specific technical knowledge.…”