Perceived Price Fairness Based On The Attribution Theory And The Influence To Customer Sastisfication And Loyalty

Price is the one of the very important competive factors in the market between companies, expecially in the industries where the product quality and the service are with small difference. Although the perceived quality has been identified as the pretty important cause to the customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, the price is also the key dimension that customers consider. Because no matter what kinds of good or service that people want to have, the price represents not only the value of the good but also the economic benefit that people would sacrifice for exchanging it. As a result, in both the academic research and the the marketing strategy, the research of price is always being an important subject. So what will happen to the customer when the price is changed? The perceived price fairness is the key content in our research.This research is constructed from two aspects: the antecedents of the perceived price fairness and the consequences of it. In the first part of this research, we use the attribution theory to analyze the cause of the price changing; and in the second part, we add the customer satisfaction and the loyalty to the model to discover the relationship of the three variables. We conduct both experiment and survy to prove our hypothesis.In our research, we find three key results. First, that the when customer are facing the disadvantage price changing, they feel less fair when they know the reason of the price changing coming from the internal of the company than from external; and the they feel more unfair when the reason of the price changing is temporary and changable than it is permanent and stable. Second, the perceived price fairness is positively influence the customer satisfaction and loyalty, especially during the high inflation period in our country. Third, the negative emotion will be generated when the price changing is disadvantage to the customer, no matter what cause is; and the negative emotion can diminish the positive influence from perceived pirce fairness to customer satisfaction and loylalty.As a result of our seserch, we can give some advice to the companies and market persons. When making or changing the price policy, they should try to avoid letting the customer perceive the reason comes from inner of the company, and it's temporary and changeable. To improve the customer satisfaction and loyalty, one method is to developing perceived price fairness and reducing negative emotions.