Research On Factors Influencing Consumer's Perception Of Price Fairness

The goal of the present research is to contribute to the existing price fairness literature by proposing and examining previously unidentified factors that influence consumer's perceptions of price fairness. The paper holds the notion that the resource of price information could influence consumer's perception of price fairness under the modification of price change.Price fairness is often of concern to consumers, policy makers, politicians, and firms. Perceptions of price fairness, which encompass a consumer's subjective sense of a price as right, just, or legitimate versus wrong, unjust, or illegitimate, can influence a variety of important marketplace factors. However, in spite of the importance of consumers' perceptions of price fairness, there is still much that people do not know about how these perceptions are formed. The most influential researches on perceived price fairness have been that by Kahneman, Knetsch and Thaler who develop the principle of dual entitlement and that by Lisa E. Bolton who put forward the transaction space theory.The identified factors that have an influence on consumer's perceptions of price fairness are transaction similarity and choice of comparative other paties, the cost-profit distribution and attributions for the inequality, buyer and seller relationship and trust as well as social norms and metaknowledge of the marketplace.The paper proposes that the marketing source of price change information , whether human or inanimate, can influence perceptions of price fairness and the the influence depends on the direction of the price change. Further, this research examines the process by which source influences price fairness. The paper proposes that the source of a price change impacts both inferences of motive and affective responses. Recent research in other domains supports dual processes, cognitive and affective, that jointly influence a variety of evaluations and behaviors. Consistent with this, the paper proposes that both cognitions and feelings evoked by the source and price change can directly influence perceptions of price fairness.