How Promotion Uncertainty Influences Post-purchase Price Unfairness

Sellers want to use promotion to attract consumers.However,for consumers who have already bought the same products,price promotion might cause price unfairness,and further contribute to negative emotions and detrimental behaviors to sellers.Exploring effective promotion methods that can lower consumers' price unfairness,is becoming extremely important in this information age.This research will begin with promotion uncertainty,discussing how certain promotion and uncertain promotion's differences on price unfairness for consumers who have already purchased before,and further excavate its internal mechanism.Based on this,we will explore how product category(material purchase vs.experiential purchase)moderates their relationship.Besides that,this thesis will also focus on consumers' individual characteristics,and find out under uncertain promotion,how risk attitude influences price unfairness.Through three experiments,we test theoretical relationships.Study 1 is to examine when price promotion involves uncertainty,how price promotion affects transaction value and further influences price unfairness.Study 2 is aimed at exploring how product category(material purchase vs.experiential purchase)influences price unfairness,and whether it moderates main effect.Study 3 is to test under uncertain promotion condition,how individual's risk attitude influences price unfairness.Results show:(1)In terms of promotion method,under all levels of probabilities,price unfairness caused by uncertain promotion is no more than that of certain promotion,and moreover mediated by transaction value,and moderated by product category(material purchase vs.experiential purchase).(2)In terms of product category,material purchase causes higher price unfairness than experiential purchase.(3)In terms of individual features,under uncertain promotion condition,for material purchase,risk seekers have higher post-purchase price unfairness than risk averters;for experiential purchase,they don't have significant differences.