Why consumers respond differently to absolute versus percentage descriptions of quantities

Financial Disclosure, Risk Perception and Investment Choices: Evidence from a Consumer Testing Exercise

“…However, presentation modes need to be carefully assessed, given that they may be highly misleading if improperly designed (Penrose, 2008) or may prompt some biases, although being 'resilient' to others. For instance, while representing costs in percentage terms could encourage the use of simplifying heuristics, using absolute values could evoke different reference context and induce subjective evaluation (Weathers et al, 2012).…”

Perceived price differences and consumer behavior.

“…In general, previous research has shown percentage-off promotions are perceived more favorably for low-price products, while money-off promotions are more attractive for high-price products. A percentage surcharge on an item priced less than (more than) 100 was evaluated less (more) favorably than if presented as a monetary amount (S.-F. S. Chen et al, 1998;González et al, 2015;Weathers et al, 2012;Weisstein et al, 2013).…”

The effectiveness of random discounts for migrating customers to the mobile channel

“…We do 1 As Experiment 1 does not include data from Western customers, we could not conduct an empirical construct equivalence test of psychological reactance across cultures (see Steenkamp & Baumgartner, 1998). However, the Psychological Reactance Scale (Hong & Faedda, 1996) not offer specific hypotheses on these two discount types because research is inconclusive on the attractiveness of absolute versus relative discounts for low-priced products (e.g., Chen, Monroe, & Lou, 1998;Lehtimäki, Monroe, & Somervuori, 2019;Weathers, Swain, & Carlson, 2012). Moreover, we do not expect differences in the perceived uncertainty of the discount amount between these traditional discounts.…”