A team of researchers from Gatton's department of Marketing and Supply Chain, including Dan Sheehan, David Hardesty, Alex Zeigler and Allan Chen, has new research accepted for publication in the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services.
In their research, they show that consumers dynamically react to price discounts according to the other discounts they have already encountered in the shopping trip. This contradicts the majority of past research, which has predominantly examined price discounts in a singular manner. The authors demonstrate that a price discount’s magnitude is less predictive of consumers’ earlier purchase intentions, but it becomes more predictive later, during an online shopping trip. Therefore, the research illustrates that retailers can increase the effectiveness of their portfolio of price discounts by placing shallow (i.e., small) price discounts early in a consumer shopping experience.
