2. 外语
  3. Imagine you are in a department store to buy a carry-on suitcase. As you walk through the store, you notice the hefty price tag

Imagine you are in a department store to buy a carry-on suitcase. As you walk through the store, you notice the hefty price tag

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问题    Imagine you are in a department store to buy a carry-on suitcase. As you walk through the store, you notice the hefty price tag on a luxury watch on display. You have no interest in the watch, which sells for $ 2,000, but does its high price affect how much you would be willing to fork out for the suitcase? Would that amount be any different, if, instead, you had noticed a much lower price on a display of bath towels? Most people, believing they are rational shoppers, would say no. Yet we have found that this is not necessarily the case.
   Marketers have long known that consumers do not have fixed ideas about what things characteristically cost, or ought to cost. In fact, exposure to comparison prices for the same product and the same brand, and for items within the same category, can influence how much a customer is willing to pay. That is why many companies try to shift perceptions about prevailing market prices upward by presenting inflated ’regular’ prices for similar or identical goods.
   But consumers are on to this game and rarely see list prices as indicative of what they should pay. Managers, therefore, must come up with something new. Recent research suggests that incidental prices—prices for unrelated goods encountered during the purchase process—can do the job. Customers are exposed to such prices without consciously making judgements about them. But these encounters, whether accidental or planned by the seller, can inflate or deflate a buyer’s willingness to pay the asking price for a given product, though most shoppers would deny this.
   To test the effect of incidental prices, we analysed sales data from one of the largest automobile auctioneers in the USA. The company’s classic car auction each year attracts some 125,000 enthusiasts, all of whom have access to historical prices and book values on site. For this study, we looked at sales records for 1,477 automobiles auctioned off between 1995 and 2000. Our findings are compelling: price differentials between pairs of successive cars offered at auction systematically affected the maximum bid for the second car. When the highest bid on the first car in a pair was 100% to 200% higher than the book value of the one that followed it, the second car fetched an average of 39% more than its book value. The larger the differential, the stronger the effect.
   The implications of these results are far-reaching. In another study, we sold copies of a popular music CD, essentially a commodity for which the price is relatively fixed, along the boardwalk in Venice Beach, California. We found that significantly more holidaymakers were willing to pay out $ 20 asking price when sweatshirts on sale nearby were priced at $ 80 than when the same sweatshirts were priced at $ 10—even when the shoppers said they had no interest in buying the sweatshirt. None of the participants interviewed after the study believed the incidental price of the sweatshirt affected his or her decision, but clearly it did.
Which of the following is TRUE of the classic car auction?
选项 A、Only 39% of the cars sold for the expected price.
B、Buyers paid more for some cars auctioned off in pairs.
C、The first car in a pair tended to attract little interest from buyers.
D、Buyers had little idea of what they should offer for the cars on auction.
答案B
解析
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