Prospecting the use of reaction times, response force and partial response force to estimate consumers’ willingness-to-pay.
The present study employed an explicit reaction time task but measured several underlying cognitive processes in an attempt to provide implicit estimates of consumers’ willingness-to-pay (WTP). Participants were asked to evaluate product-price combinations as cheap or expensive. The prices of the products ranged from very cheap to very expensive. Crucially, participants had to complete the task under time pressure while the dependent variables of interest could not be influenced deliberately. This is because we explored whether the magnitude of the price stimulus interfered with the reaction times (RTs), response force (RF) and partial responses (PRs). The results of our study demonstrated that both RTs and RF are influenced by the magnitude of the price and it is postulated that these dependent measures indeed have the potential to investigate consumers’ WTP. Future studies need to further investigate the possibilities of these implicit variables and validate eventual estimates.