EXPRESS: The Impact of Historical Price Information on Purchase Deferral

In this paper, the authors examine how historical price information influences consumers’ decision to defer a purchase. They focus on two aspects of historical price information: the direction and the frequency of past price changes. The authors advance a theoretical framework which postulates that the interaction between these two factor shapes consumers’ decisions to buy now versus later. Controlling for the total magnitude of price changes, the authors propose that consumers are more likely to defer purchase when the price of the product has previously increased compared to when the price has decreased. Importantly, the authors hypothesize that this effect is more pronounced when consumers observe a single large change in price (e.g., an increase of $100 versus a decrease of $100) compared to when they observe multiple smaller changes that establish a trend (e.g., four decreases of $25 versus four increases of $25). The authors argue that these effects are driven by differences in consumers’ expectations about future prices. They test their predictions, as well as two moderators of the proposed effects—the monotonicity and the timing of price changes—in six well-powered pre-registered experimental studies (N = 5,713) using both hypothetical and actual purchases.