Is (Price) Ignorance Bliss? Hedonic Price Aversion and Consumer Experience

Abstract

While substantial literature examines how information order influences consumer decision-making, little research has explored when consumers prefer to learn price information, why, or how these preferences affect consumption. Across one field study and five preregistered experiments (N = 9,614), we find that consumers focused on decision efficiency prefer to learn price information earlier as opposed to later. By contrast, consumers who focus on enjoyment expect that learning prices will undermine their consumption experience. As a result, they prefer to delay learning prices to a greater extent. In the context of a real consumption experience, though, we show that consumption experience is essentially unaffected by the timing in which price information is learned. We refer to this disconnect between expectation and experience as hedonic price aversion. Further, we show that this aversion is attenuated when consumers are reminded of the immersive nature of consumption itself. Future work may seek to identify further miscalibrations related to price’s effects, specifically, and more generally, with regard to consumers’ beliefs about the effects of information on their experiences.

Keywords: price, sampling, experience, enjoyment, misprediction