Do price-tags influence consumers’ willingness to pay? On the external validity of using auctions for measuring value
研究实验室拍卖测得的消费者支付意愿能否推广到真实零售场景，发现告知实际售价会显著改变支付意愿，修正幅度约为价格误差的四分之一。
Abstract This paper considers the external validity of the growing corpus of literature that reports the use of laboratory auctions to reveal consumers’ willingness to pay for consumer goods, when the concerned goods are sold in retail stores through posted price procedures. The quality of the parallel between the field and the lab crucially depends on whether being informed of the actual field price influences a consumer's willingness to pay for a good or not. We show that the elasticity of the WTP revision according to the field price estimation error is significant, positive, and can be roughly approximate to one quarter of the error. We then discuss the normative implications of these results for future experiments aimed at eliciting private valuations through auctions.