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The discount image associated with odd-ending prices has led to its extensive use by retailers. The purpose of this study is to assess the impacts and applications of nine-ending vs round-ending prices on the purchase of green and non-green products at different price levels and under different purchase motivations.

Three experiments are conducted. The first experiment is a 2 (price ending: nine-ending vs round-ending) × 2 (product appeal: green vs non-green) between-subjects study; the second experiment is a 2 (price ending: nine-ending vs round-ending) × 2 (price level: low price vs high price) × 2 (product appeal: green vs non-green) between-subjects study; and the third experiment examined buyers’ preferences of price endings regarding the purchase of green products having either utility (utilitarian) or pleasure (hedonic) motivation.

This research highlights that consumers prefer zero-ending prices for green products and pleasure motivation products, but they prefer odd endings for low-priced and utilitarian products. These results support the increased reception of round-ending prices. Accordingly, this study contributes to the literature by providing a boundary condition for odd-ending prices. Specifically, the study finds that the effect of nine-ending prices becomes weaker as the price of the product increases.

The findings of this study have practical implications for managers, as the results indicate that pricing green products and high-quality perception products using round digits and pricing low-priced and utility perception products using odd digits will increase consumers’ purchase intentions. Moreover, pricing the products using round-ending prices will reduce the perception of low quality and deter brand loyalty emanating from a low-priced/discount image of a product.

This research contributes to theoretical and practical aspects of behavioural pricing literature. This research uncovers the buyers’ distinct preferences for zero-ending prices and odd-ending prices when purchasing different products based on different motivations and varied price levels. This is the first research of its kind to explore and compare the impact of psychological pricing on green products. The study also resolves a contradiction in past literature regarding the use of nine-ending prices by providing boundary conditions.

The practice of pricing with numbers ending in nine (“nine‐ending”) has been little studied. It now seems well established that, under certain conditions, the practice of such pricing strategies has a particular effect on sales, especially inciting the customer to buy products that are more expensive. The research design for explaining such an effect would depend on the price encoding mechanisms, namely, the emphasis of focusing attention, which decreases when reading from left to right, leading to only partial memorization of the price. This would favour the leftmost digits, thus leading to errors of evaluation or estimation of the starting price. A new experiment was carried out to test this possibility. Subjects had to estimate the discount rate of products in a sale, according to whether the starting price was a “rounded” figure or “odd‐ending”. Assuming the first digit of the price is memorized, we might expect that a round starting price leads to an overestimation of the amount of the offered discount. The results provide evidence in support of this hypothesis, enabling us to gain a more accurate knowledge of the processes used for estimating the starting price.

The purpose of this research is to test for price threshold effects in the demand for high-involvement services for small businesses.

The authors use a stated preference choice-based conjoint study of small business telecommunications demand. Using survey data, individual-level parameter estimates for a demand model are achieved via the Hierarchical Bayes method of estimation.

For demand for small business telecommunications services, the authors find very strong positive impacts of nine-ending and zero-ending prices on the demand for a common bundle of telecommunications services (wired telephone service, broadband internet, and cellular telephone service), even at prices so high a shift in the left-most digit does not occur.

The advertising, brand, or product manager or statistician who assumes threshold effects are not extant in high-involvement service demand may find conventional demand estimation methods lead to erroneous conclusions and less effective pricing strategies.

In the statistical literature on price-ending effects on product demand, most products for which demand is modelled are low-involvement consumer products priced at less than ten monetary units per unit of product. There is a lacuna in this price-ending effects literature regarding small businesses and high-involvement services offered at three-digit prices via monthly subscription. This research indicates that testing for threshold effects should be de rigeur in the methodology of demand estimation for telecommunications or other high-involvement services.

This study aims to analyse the use of psychological pricing in online food retailing. In stationary grocery shops, psychological prices with nine-endings have been a well-documented phenomenon for many decades. However, little is known about the relevance of this pricing practice in the growing grocery e-commerce sector.

The authors investigate the frequency of nine-ending prices at Amazon Fresh for more than 10,000 products from May 2019 until March 2020 for the customer location Berlin, Germany. Applying a within–between logit model, the authors identify the determinants for the use of nine-ending prices.

The authors find that more than 70% of all prices end in the digit 9. This indicates that Amazon Fresh applies psychological pricing to a similar degree as traditional offline grocers. Nine-ending prices are more likely for so-called “want” products such as snacks and sweets than for “should” products such as fruits and vegetables. Also, psychological price endings are used less for products with a higher price level and for products with temporary sales promotions.

This study is the first to analyse psychological pricing practices for the world's largest online food retailer Amazon Fresh. The study results contrast with most previous empirical and theoretical studies, which suggest that the use of psychological prices would decline in an online context.

Although findings have been somewhat inconsistent, there is evidence from both experimental studies and field research that prices set just below the nearest round figure produce higher than expected demand at that level. Among the different explanations that have been proposed for these effects are that consumers round prices down, encode prices from left to right, remember only the “most important” digits of a price, and/or attach certain “images” to nine‐ending prices. Utilizing a unique experimental setting, the author examines dollar vs cents digit recall as well as the choice frequencies associated with zero‐ vs nine‐ending prices to determine the efficacy of the proposed explanations. Within this setting, the author concludes that left‐to‐right digit encoding may be a necessary condition for higher than expected demand.

Using adaptation‐level theory as a conceptual framework, the purpose of this research is to determine what effect, if any, marketplace conditioning has on consumer price estimates and product evaluations.

A total of 475 subjects participated in two experiments that required them to read a scenario, evaluate a series of advertised products, and perform an aided price recall task.

The results suggest consumers are more likely to recall the correct price when more of the rightmost digits end in 0 or 9. Moreover, when prices are incorrectly recalled, consumers are likely to inadvertently assume prices end in commonly used rightmost digits (i.e. 5 and 9). Combined, the results demonstrate odd pricing effects are likely a result of marketplace price conditioning rather than truncation of rightmost digits as suggested by the analog model of numerical cognition.

Findings suggest that use of atypical rightmost digits in odd prices fails as a method to differentiate products in the mind of the consumer. This would explain the use of larger right ending digits by retailers in an effort to maximize profit without impacting consumer perceptions of quality, value, and purchase likelihood. In the absence of strong quality image effects, retailers are encouraged to continue the practice of setting prices with digits ending in 9.

A key theoretical implication of this study is that the underestimation heuristic based on leftmost digit processing fails to explain the results of the incorrectly recalled price estimates. As a result, adaptation‐level theory may provide a more robust explanation for odd pricing effects.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of behavioral pricing research, including the identification of the primary areas studied and a summary of the core findings in each based on previous literature.

This research examines 613 articles on the ISI Web of Science database and focuses on marketing journals that discuss behavioral pricing. The reviews of these articles use traditional literature review and research profiling methods.

The main subareas in behavioral pricing this study identifies are the price–quality relationship, reference price, price awareness, price elasticity estimation and price fairness. In general, the behavioral pricing field is relatively new, and all subareas would benefit from additional research.

For pricing researchers, this study offers integrative insights into the field based on previous literature and identifies the main contribution and main topic of each. The study also offers suggestions for new research ideas.

Research has shown that when the original and the sale prices were displayed in a horizontal direction, with the sale price to the right (“Original price of $349.99/Sale price $239.99”), consumers are more likely to initiate a subtraction task to calculate the amount of the discount; and this subtraction effect would lead to better consumer value perception than if the sale price was to the left. However, fewer scholars have questioned whether the subtraction effect would still operate if the reference-price ads line up in a vertical direction? The aim of this research is to understand how different formations of reference-price ads may affect consumers' price perception and buying intention. Interestingly, positive effects on buying intention and value perceptions disappeared when buyers were shown a dollars-saved cue, rather than the lineup of original and sale prices.

Three experiments were conducted to test the hypotheses.

The results of the experiments demonstrate that when the sale price is displayed above the original price, consumers' price perception and buying intention are higher than what is placed below it.

When written horizontally, Mandarin and Japanese language text are almost always written left-to-right, with multiple rows progressing downward, as in standard English text. Notably, the right-to-left written form for Mandarin and Japanese language only happens by writing in a vertically and multiple-columned context. In particular, the format of reference-price ads in our research is considered to be a generally single column text only. Therefore, its writing system has almost no difference from the English one. However, our hypothesis does not apply to the Arabic world due to the right-to-left nature of the Arabic writing system.

Our results may inform consumers whether their cognition, which influences them not to make irrational decisions, is in turn influenced by sale price display location. Consumers should be reminded that next time they see the smaller number (sale price) they should not be too excited and forget to properly consider the original price. They should think more and consider the distance to the shop or the quality of the product before buying anything. If a product is sold in two different shops and the farther one displays the sale price above the original price but the nearer one displays the sale price below the original price, prolonging the decision time enables consumers to decrease their buying costs, such as the cost of fuel.

This is one of the first studies to discuss the influence of the price location in a vertical direction on price perception and buying intention.

This paper aims to explore not only the utilitarian but also the hedonic persuasive effects of promotional techniques like 99-ending prices and the influence of consumers’ decision style when evaluating these appeals. Evidence suggests that retailers use 99-ending prices as a promotional technique, based mostly on its savings appeal.

Three complementary studies were performed. A first field study among 317 shoppers allows to test the hypotheses for two groups of decision-makers (intuitive and analytical) using structural equation modeling based on the partial least squares algorithm. Then, a laboratory experiment assigned to 123 respondents manipulates the decision-making style and, in turn, tests more precisely the proposed hypotheses. Finally, the third study replicates the laboratory experiment with 104 respondents without manipulating decision-making; rather it is measured, which allows to test the effect of internal-based versus contextual-based decision style.

First, the 99-ends are not strictly associated to utilitarian benefits (savings, quality or convenience) but also to hedonic benefits fulfilling consumer’s needs for exploration, value expression and entertainment. Second, a better understanding of the moderating role of the decision-making style is obtained: consumers in an intuitive decision mode give importance only to hedonic benefits; and there are differences in the analytical decision mode: when the decision-making style is internal (measured as a personal trait), consumers give importance to both utilitarian and hedonic benefits; however, when the decision-making style is contextual (manipulated), consumers focus only on utilitarian benefits.

It is necessary to check the robustness of the results depending on other marketing variables (e.g. product category knowledge, purchase frequency) and individual consumers’ differences in price-sensitivity (e.g. price consciousness).

The findings help to better understand the image effect of 99-ends underlying both consumers’ individual differences and contextual effects. Findings also help retailers and pricing managers in their use of 99-ends as a promotional technique.

This research contributes to a better understanding of the persuasive promotional effect associated to 99-ends. The study demonstrates that utilitarian benefits cannot fully explain consumers’ responses to 99-ends, as 99-end prices can also provide stimulation, entertainment and help fulfill consumers’ needs for information, exploration and self-esteem. The authors further examine the moderating role of the decision-making style between promotional benefits and proneness to buy 99-ends products. The intuitive mode, either internal or contextual, activates hedonic benefits, whereas the analytical mode activates both utilitarian and hedonic benefits when the mode of processing is internal and only utilitarian benefits when the mode of processing is contextual.