Price or quality? The influence of fluency on the dual role of price

The first pretest to develop the experimental stimuli was conducted with 30 participants (not included in the two main experiments). The pretest showed a moderate level of consumer familiarity with the chosen products (cell phones in study 1 and handbags in study 2), with minimum variance. Based on the pretest results, we gathered products from the market as experimental stimuli so the experiment would better reflect actual market conditions. The second pretest (N = 60) was to determine the high and low price levels of the chosen products. Thirty participants were in the cell phone scenario and the other 30 participants were in the handbag scenario with a picture and a brief description of the product features (but no price information). After reading the product descriptions, all the participants had to indicate the “most” and “least” they were willing to pay for the products, with “least” referring to the price below which they would infer inferior quality (Bornemann and Homburg, 2011). According to the respective means of these price indications, the researcher determined the price levels of the cell phone (high, $156 vs. low, $83) and the handbag (high, $134 vs. low, $59).

In the pretest, 30 undergraduate students excluded from the other experiments and pretests were shown fonts of pictures and descriptions of the handbag, and asked to rate them on a seven-point scale ranging from “very easy to read” to “very difficult to read.” The results showed that participants rated the difficult-to-read font more difficult to read than the easy-to-read font presented in a standard font (M _difficult = 5.12, SD = .57 versus M _easy = 2.94, SD = .61; t = 16.32, p < .01).