Do Consumers Take Advantage of Common Pricing Standards? An Experimental Investigation
通过实验检验消费者在部分产品使用通用定价标准时的选择行为，发现通用标准产品更易被查看但更少被选中，且消费者使用“优势编辑”操作消除明显劣势选项，这反而激励卖家避免使用通用标准。
Gaudeul and Sugden [Gaudeul A, Sugden R (2012) Spurious complexity and common standards in markets for consumer goods. Economica 79(314):209–225] have hypothesized that when some but not all competing products are priced in a common standard, consumers who are liable to make errors in cross-standard price comparisons use decision rules that discriminate in favor of common-standard offers. Such behavior incentivizes sellers to use common standards. We report an experimental test of this hypothesis, using choice tasks similar to those represented in the Gaudeul–Sugden model. We find that offers priced in common standards were more likely to be inspected but less likely to be chosen, and that subjects gained little benefit from common pricing standards that applied to some but not all offers. Most subjects used “dominance editing” operations that eliminated transparently dominated offers, either as an initial shortlisting device or while offers were being sorted. Because these operations discriminate against common-standard offers, their use incentivizes sellers not to use common standards. Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2676 . This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.