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An Exploratory Study on the Effect of Price as an Anchor on Willingness-to-pay: Anchoring-and-adjustment or Selective Accessibility

  • Song, Jae-Do (College of Business Administration, Chonnam National University)
  • Received : 2016.07.19
  • Accepted : 2017.01.12
  • Published : 2017.01.31

Abstract

The two competing underlying mechanisms of anchoring, anchoring-and-adjustment and selective accessibility, have very different managerial implications for the effect of price as an anchor on willingness-to-pay (WTP). To clarify their relative roles in inducing the anchoring effect, path analysis modeling in which two paths are included in a single model was utilized. The first path proceeds directly from anchor price to WTP, representing anchor-and-adjustment. The second path, representing selective accessibility, includes a mediator formed by various explanatory variables of WTP. The results consistently show that only the direct path, anchoring-and-adjustment, is significant. The results also show that the level of available product information has no significant moderation effect on both of the paths, which implies the robustness of the result with respect to information level.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2014S1A5A2A03064942).

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