YEDITEPE UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES Ph.D.

PROGRAM IN BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION MARKETING TRACK

INTERNAL REFERENCE PRICE AND EGO DEPLETION EFFECTS, AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

Proposal of dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Marketing

Proposed By Ahmet Nuri KKOSMANOLU

Advisor Dr. Yusuf Can ERDEM

Istanbul, July 2012

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction .................................................................................................................................2

Significance Of The Research ....................................................................................................2

Research Questions .....................................................................................................................4

Internal reference price Effect ....................................................................................................4

The State Of Ego-Depletion........................................................................................................8

Theoretical Model .....................................................................................................................10

Experimental Methodology ......................................................................................................12

Process Flow Diagram Of The Experiment ..............................................................................13

Manipulation And Measurement Of Variables .........................................................................13

Analysis Of Data .......................................................................................................................18

References .................................................................................................................................19

INTRODUCTION
In daily life consumers often choose reference points to evaluate physical stimuli and having exposed to new physical stimuli, those references are modified. Specifically, in marketing context one of the most important applications of this concept is internal reference price, an internal standard against which observed prices are compared (Kalyanaram and Winer, 1995).

In daily decision making process, consumers are reported to depend on a limited internal reserve which is called self-regulatory resources. Making a free, responsible decision to perform a task led to decrements in self-regulation (Baumeister et al., 1998). The resource appears to be quite limited, insofar as a brief exercise of self-regulation is sufficient to cause significant impairments in subsequent performance (Baumeister, 2003). Depletion of selfregulatory resources is often called as a mental state of Ego Depletion which is considered as an important bias factor in consumers decision making process (Baumeister and Vohs, 2007). The main purpose of this research is to discover whether consumers internal state of ego depletion moderates the process of internal reference price change or not. A secondary research aim is to discover associations and correlations between consumer heterogeneity and internal reference price.

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE RESEARCH

There is increasing report of evidence about certain undesired burdens of customers inner state of ego depletion on daily decision making process (Vohs and Faber, 2007). As customers resources for self-regulation are reduced or depleted they fall back to routine and

automatic behavior as a basis for decision-making (Baumeister and Vohs, 2007) which involves use of shortcuts, rules of thumb and heuristics such as internal reference price considerations. Internal reference prices have been reported to have consistent and significant impacts on consumer demand (Kalyanaram and Winer, 1995).

The consumers in a shopping context may encounter any kind of designed or natural schemes that may cause critical ego depletion patterns. The results of this study may enable consumers to understand the kinds of vulnerabilities (ie. impulse buying (Vohs and Faber, 2007), price framing (Jany, 2009), influencing tactics (Fennis et al., 2009)) for them while internal reference price mechanism could be interacting with ego depletion effects. Alternatively, our results may well help managers in designing price change or promotion strategies in consideration or in preparation with relevant ego depleting or nondepleting schemes for their customers in a shopping context.

Recently studies have begun to explore the link between self-regulation failure and buyer behavior. However, studies addressing self regulation failure across internal reference price issues are limited. We found a single study that examined the relationship between price framing, ego depletion and consumer choice (Jany, 2009). No studies found about the hypothetical relationship between ego depletion and internal reference price update mechanism. Our research may explore a missing link between internal reference price updating mechanism and consumers inner state of ego depletion.

Finally, we need to address that there is a flurry of extant research on internal reference price that has been performed on secondary panel data. However, consumer heterogeneity could not have been well addressed in such studies due to the nature of panel data and more experimental studies needed to fill the gap in this area (Mazumdar et al., 2005). Our research as an experimental study may provide valuable empirical support especially in successfully

addressing consumer heterogeneity for the account of internal reference price effect in interaction with ego depletion state of consumers.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS
We aim to explore and provide empirical support for the following research questions:

R1: Is there a moderating effect of ego depletion on internal reference price update mechanism.

R2: Are there possible associations and correlations between consumer characteristics, demographics and internal reference price update mechanism.

R3: Are there possible associations or correlations between consumer characteristic, demographics and ego depletion level.

R4: Is it possible to create distinct shopper profiles that give consistent responses both for ego depletion and internal reference price update mechanisms.

R5: Is it possible to extract a map of consumer characteristics showing the risk of falling into pricing tactics vs ego depletion.

INTERNAL REFERENCE PRICE EFFECT

Internal reference price effect is a well-established topic in consumer price perception studies. Most well-known studies starting from Webber-Fechners law of Just-NoticeableDifference (Fechner, 1860), continuing with Assimilation-Contrast Theory (Sherif and Hovland, 1961), Adaptation-Level Theory (Helson, 1964), Anchoring Theory (Kahneman and Tversky, 1974), Prospect Theory (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979) and Mental Accounting

Theory (Thaler, 1985), have provided significant theoretical contributions to internal reference price concept. Elaboration of Likelihood Model (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986) provided insight about use of internal reference price as a shortcut in consumer decision making process.

In the marketing literature, the notion of "internal reference price" has often been used in studies concerned with measuring consumers reactions to price (McCarville et al., 1993). Consumers choose or form internal reference price points to evaluate new price stimuli. Internal reference price has been considered in terms of both external and internally held standards (McCarville et al., 1993). Outer world references are called external internal reference prices and the ones that are formed in consumers minds are called internal reference prices.

There are several studies about internal reference price effects. Some of them aimed to develop models for formation, update and measurement of internal reference price. Some others studied effects of shopping context and framing, while some few are focusing on consumer specific factors such as demographics, psychographics or psychological factors on internal reference price. It turns out that there is plethora of contextual, psychological and even physical factors that moderate internal reference price effect. As an inner standard, the definition of internal reference price should intuitively correspond to the expectation of customer in purchasing context. Customers use the price they expect to pay for a brand on a given purchase occasion as a reference in forming price judgments (Kalwani et al., 1990). Although, it is occasionally named as expected price (Emery, 1970; Winer, 1986; Klein and Oglethorpe, 1987; Urbany et al. 1988; Diamond and Campbell, 1989; Kalwani et al. 1990; Jacobson and Obermiller, 1990) in congruence to the root of the concept, we prefer the term internal reference price since it is most commonly used in literature. We

can conclude that internal reference price is an internal standard that customers used as the price they expect to pay for a specific branded/nonbranded product on a given purchase occasion as a reference in forming their price judgements.

Internal reference price is considered as a cognitive construct but unlike others, internal reference prices do not exhibit primacy effects, rather strong recency effects (Briesch et al., 1997). Internal reference prices are proved to have strong dependence on the last price paid (Kalwani et al., 1990; Lattin and Bucklin 1989).

Having exposed to new price stimuli, internal reference prices are re-formed (Briesch et al., 1997). Specifically, in a purchasing process, consumers form or re-form internal reference prices depending on the prices they are exposed to (Winer, 1986). As quoted by Kahneman and Tversky (1979) Our perceptual apparatus is attuned to the evaluation of changes rather than to the evaluation of absolute.

Intuitively, Anchoring Theory (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974) suggests that merely an exposure to price info is able to change consumers price expectation. Likewise, Narasimhan et al. (2005) went beyond the term last price paid and used last price offered as it always exists and affects customers price perception, even if a purchase hasnt been realized. For long it is known that marketers could influence and manipulate consumers internal reference price by presenting them external internal reference prices. As a result of interaction between external internal reference price and the internal reference price in consumers mind to the purpose of judging the normal and fair prices, presenting external internal reference prices to consumers can create such manipulation (Lichtenstein and Bearden, 1989; Urbany, et al., 1989).

As to create a proper use an understanding for our experimental setting and manipulation, we considered here in our experimental setting, last price as the price information of a specific product with a certain brand that consumers are lastly exposed to.

As a counterintuitive fact, consumers are shown to have poor memory of exactly numeric historical price data in various price recall studies (Krishna et al., 1991; Mazumdar and Monroe, 1992). However, consumers are also shown to have quite good implicit memories of internal reference price (Monroe and Lee, 1999). That is to say, even though consumers do not remember and report internal reference prices explicitly, they could well recognize which price is a good or bad price in an actual purchasing process (Lawson and Bhagat, 2002).

Building on Assimilation-Contrast Theory (Sherif and Hovland, 1961), Monroe and Petroshius (1981) suggested a region called latitude of acceptance around internal reference prices. Within this latitude, new price information is assimilated towards the internal reference price as to set new internal reference price point for the customer. Out of this latitude, new price information is either contrasted that is to say ignored, or discounted (Urbany et al., 1988) in certain conditions while still affecting the existing internal reference price to form a new internal reference price point.

Apart from being solely dependent on past prices, internal reference price as a measure of expectation has been conceptualized as function of several other contextual factors such as store environment conditions, promotions, product or category charactesistis and consumer heterogeneity. We have chosen to study consumer heterogeneity, since it has been reported to cause significant variability in internal reference price mechanism and encountering consumer heterogeneity in the model is suggested to improve our understandings of the mechanism (Mazumdar et al., 2005). Consumer heterogeneity in forms of purchase timing or task types has been studied as moderator of internal reference price effect in extant literature

(Mazumdar et al., 2005; Kalyanaram and Winer, 1995; Moon and Voss, 2009). It is a promising area in terms of daily life implications for consumers and managerial implications for marketing professionals. There is a wealth of information that may guide important aspects of marketing practice such as segmentation, though the number of studies in this are is quite limited as to imply a gap of research in this area.

THE STATE OF EGO-DEPLETION

Self regulation is defined as human beings ability of altering his own reponses. This way, human being gets the opportunity to develop flexible and diversified human behavior against natural urges and away from automatic, reflexive and instinctual responses (Muraven et al., 1999). This is an advanced level of self-regulation ability and it shall be considered as the most distictive endowment of the human being.

A review of Baumeister et al. (1994) concluded that self-regulation failure is a central part of the majority of personal and social problems in modem Western societies. Researchers have also found that 4-year-olds who showed a high capacity to delay their hedonic urges were more successful later in their life, both socially and academically, suggesting that selfregulation is an important long-term feature of personality (Mischel et al., 1988; Shoda, et al., 1990).

Such a distinctive and valuable endowment is also supposed to be limited. Baumeister et al. (1998) proposed a limited availability resource model and suggested that the self uses the same limited resource for all its acts of volition, including both self-control and active choice, and hence the term ego depletion was chosen to describe the state of weakness and vulnerability that apparently ensues when the self has already engaged in some acts of deliberate choice, active responding, or effortful self-regulation. In other words, in all acts of

volition the self uses some resource that operates like an energy or strength, and after such an act the selfs stock of this resource is depleted (Baumeister and Exline, 1999).

Ego-depletion or alternatively low level availability of self-regulatory resources is a state of mind where people suffer lack of resources to assign to any additional task (Baumeister and Vohs, 2007).

Evidence of from ego-depletion studies proved severe biases in decision making processes. One of the recent studies has shown that ego depletion results in consumers increasing vulnerability against price framing tactics (Jany, 2009). Another study proved that the less available consumers self-regulatory resources, the more prone were consumers to spend on impulse purchases (Vohs and Faber, 2007).

Ego-depletion could be caused by a variety of physical, metabolic or mental factors. Some of those factors include, overloading of mental resources, blood-glucose level, physical tiredness or hunger (Hagger et al., 2010; Gailliot at al., 2007; Muraven et al., 1998).

Experimentally ego depletion state has been successfully simulated through intensive exercise of certain processes that require sel-control. Baumeister et al. (2007) classified selfcontrol requiring processes as (a) controlling attention, (b) controlling emotions, (c) controlling impulses, (d) controlling thoughts, (e) cognitive processing, (f) practicing choice and volition, and (g) social processing.

Hagger et al. (2010) reported that common examples of impulse control tasks required participants to resist gratifying activities or overriding impulsive habits, such as resisting delicious foods (e.g., DeWall et al., 2007; Geeraert and Yzerbyt, 2007) or resisting the urge to pronounce the target word instead of telling the typeface color in Stroop color-naming tasks (Webb and Sheeran, 2003; Bray et al., 2008). In the same study, Hagger et al. classified

crossing out letters among 5 most frequently used depletion tasks based on 83 distinct egodepletion studies that are eligibly chosen from 198 studies reviewed. Crossing out letters is also reported to have medium to high average effect size on ego depletion.

THEORETICAL MODEL
We will explore the hypothetical impact of ego depletion during the process of re-formation of internal reference price as a result of last price exposure. Our model claims that ego depletion may have a moderator impact on the relationship between last price and internal reference price. To this purpose we added ego depletion into our model as a moderator variable.

The conceptualization of internal reference price in interaction with last price has been widely used in literature (Hardie et al., 1993; Mayhew and Winer, 1992; Krishnamurthy at al., 1992). We used a similar concept in our theoretical model.

Consumer heterogeneity has been reported to cause significant variability in internal reference price mechanism and encountering consumer heterogeneity in the model is suggested to improve our understandings of the mechanism (Mazumdar et al., 2005; Kalyanaram and Winer, 1995; Moon and Voss, 2009). To address this issue firstly we included basic demographics, secondly we adopted shopping characteristics from the sudy of Vanhuele and Dreze (2000) and lastly we will adopt a useful and practical shopper profile from literature to represent consumer heterogeneity effects and put them in

association/correlation with internal reference price in the model.

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Figure 1: Theoretical Model of Internal Reference Price Update and Ego-Depletion Effect

Our initial hypotheses are as follows:

H1:

Last price has a positive effect on internal reference price.

H2:

Ego depletion has a negative moderating effect on the relationship between internal

reference price and last price.

H3:

There is a positive correlation between income level and internal reference price.

H4:

There is an association between marital status and internal reference price

H5:

There is an association between gender and internal reference price.

H6:

There is a negative correlation between gender and internal reference price.

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H7:

There is a positive correlation between education and internal reference price.

We will have additional consumer characteristics in the model and extend our hypotheses as to explore various aspects of consumer heterogeneity.

EXPERIMENTAL METHODOLOGY
We propose to employ 2 x 2 factorial experiment groups. The experiment is supposed to be designed to accommodate groups of eight to ten persons and to be arranged in two sessions, held in two successive days. A total of four groups will be employed in the experiment.

The unit of analysis for the study will be the market shoppers of fast moving consumer goods in Istanbul between ages of twenty and sixty. The subjects will be randomly chosen from active supermarket shoppers in Istanbul. Inclusion criterion is to maintain balanced numbers in forming homogeneous groups in terms of age, gender, income and occupation.

The experiments will be held in central office and school locations. Instructions and experimental conditions will be presented to participans on printed material. All the instructions will be verbally communicated to all subjects in advance of the experiment.

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PROCESS FLOW DIAGRAM OF THE EXPERIMENT

Figure 2: Process Flow Diagram of the Experiment

MEASUREMENT AND MANIPULATION OF VARIABLES

Initial Measurement of Internal Reference Price:

The subjects will be provided with real shelf images of seven products each belongs to a distinct category of daily consumed fast moving consumer goods with market leader brand names (ie. Brand X Milk, 1 lt pack). The shelf images will have no price information. Upon presentation of the images the subjects will be asked to estimate and indicate the price for those products by choosing from options of five possible price brackets for each product. Afterwards, the subjects will be asked to write down auditory verbal coding of the exact price and finally provide it in visual Arabic format. 13

Real life shelf images are used to simulate analogy of a shopping environment. The images are also aimed at easing the recognition and matching the product and price in the memory. Price information is purposely removed off the images in order to be able to retrieve the original level of internal reference prices from the long term memories of subjects. Price brackets are used to tap into recognition measures instead of recall measures which have been reported as an ineffective way of measuring price knowledge.

Experimental considerations for propoer price knowledge measurement are adopted from the review and findings in literatue (Vanhuele and Dreze, 2000; Vanhuele and Dreze 2002; Monroe and Lee, 1999, Dehaene, 1992).

This initial measurement is taken by aiming to measure the initial level of our dependent variable. In the second session of the experiment we will measure this variable again and get the difference.

Initial Measurement of Self-Regulatory Capacity:

The subjects will be provided a spring-loaded handgrip tool and asked to hold fastened in hand until exhaustion. The performance in this task is shown as almost totally dependent on self regulatory capacity (Muraven et al., 1998) and will power rather then physical strength or endurance. The durations of handgrip task are measured for each participant and recorded as to represent self regulatory capacity for each subject that will be used later in measuring the level of ego depletion for each individual.

Manipulation of Ego Depletion Level:

To manipulate ego depletion levels of the subjects and simulate ego-depletion state in accordance with the dual task paradigm (Baumeister et al., 1998; Finkel, 2006), an

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independent depletion task of crossing out letters will be applied on one experimental group. Crossing out letters task is described as crossing out all instances of a particular letter in a passage of text but only when it is adjacent to certain other letters (Hagger et al., 2010). The second group will be instructed to perform a non depleting version of crossing out letters task which means participants would be asked to cross out all instances of the letter without an inhibiting rule.

Creation of Last Price Image:

In order to create a controlled last price image under experimental conditions, we will provide subjects the shelf images of previously surveyed products again but this time with certain price information on the shelves.

This independent variable will be manipulated by exposing half of the consumers to to 20% higher prices, while the other half will be exposed to 20% lower prices. The study of Kalyanaram and Little (1994) shows latitude of acceptance for assimilation in prices of drinks for example is around 4-10%. We estimated that a 20% price difference in fast moving consumer goods is a sizeable difference for the customers to notice and react to. Our lower price manipulation rate is adopted from study of DelVecchio et al. (2006) who found that discounts deeper than 20% are perceived as less credible and trustworthy among the customers. Our higher price manipulation rate is well below the results of the study of Urbany et al. (1988) who found that an exaggerated external price stimuli even far above (more than double) the market prices, though it would be contrasted, has still a potential upward shift effect on customers price perceptions.

The subjects will be asked to find the visual Arabic price code on the images and match it with the relevant price bracket among five price bracket options given. They will also be

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asked to code those prices in auditory verbal communication codes manually on the paper. This will help auditory verbal, visual Arabic and analogue magnitude encoding of prices at the same time in the memory for effective and homogenous processing between the consumers who have different preferred forms of numerical memory as proposed by TripleCode Model (Dehaene, 1992).

Measuring the Magnitude of Ego Depletion Effect:

The subjects were assumed to have manipulated ego-depletion levels after finishing the independent depletion task of crossing out letters. To measure the level of manipulation, a dependent ego depletion task will be assigned at each of the participants in both groups. They will be provided with a spring-loaded handgrip tool to hold fastened in hand until exhaustion. When the participant gave up holding the handgrip, the duration will be measured and recorded. In line with the conceptualization of dual task paradigm, the duration of holding the handgrip until exhaustion will provide us a measure about the magnitude of ego depletion effect in the first depletion task. Since, self regulation efforts draw from the same, limited self-regulation resource, shorter durations in the second task will account larger ego depletion effects for the initial ego depletion task. This widely used process is adopted from the original study of Muraven et al. (1998).

Measuring the Magnitude of Internal Reference Price Effect:

The participants are contacted the next day again. They are provided with shelf images of, a certain market leader branded product which is chosen from the list of products that have been presented earlier (ie. Brand X Milk, 1 lt. pack). The shelf images do not present price information. Participants are again asked to choose and indicate a price bracket for that

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product among five possible price bracket options given. Finally, they will be asked to provide exact price expectation both in visual Arabic and auditory verbal codes on the paper.

This second session is held one day apart in order to be able to minimize short term memory effects and recover from the previous price exposure as to better tap into long term memory for prices (Vanhuele and Dreze, 2000). Aiming to minimize unconscious, short term memorization of the prices, we purposely included seven products in different categories in the experiment and surveyed one of them in the end.

This final measurement will allow us to calculate the difference between the initial and final reference prices which corresponds to the magnitude of internal reference price effect in our model.

Consumer Characteristics Shopper Profile Demographics:

The following demographics will be studied in our experimental research:

Age, gender, education, marital status, household income

We will adopt the shopping characteristics from the study of Vanhuele and Dreze (2000) which found three groups of variables that are effective in consumer price knowledge:

The propensity to engage in in- store price search, the propensity to engage in across-store price search, and shopping trip/household size.

We will decide on a shopper profile after reviewing relevant literature for a useful and practical segmentation in rela life.

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ANALYSIS OF DATA
We will apply test-retest and parallel forms methods to assess stability of our variables. Reliability measures will be taken for shopper profile and shopping characteristics instruments.

The data will be checked for skewness, peakness and outliers in order to assess data validity and reliability.

The model will be analysed through multiple regression and correlation analysis in order to assess the theoretical model and determine hypotecised relationships between dependent, independent & moderating variables.

Finally, measures of association and correlation analysis will be performed through demographics, shopping characteristic, shopper profile in order to assess the hypothecised associations or correlations with internal reference price.

CONCLUSION
We aim to provide empirical support for this relatively new junction area of two important research topics and to deliver practical and useful results that will guide marketers and customers in daily life.

As an experimental study we will have important considerations and troubles that will put some limitations on our study such as limited number of subjects and difficulties of establishing the congruence of conditions between the real life and experimental setup.

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