Marketing textbooks tend to follow economic theory in their discussions of pricing, but in the real world pricing is an alchemical mixture of costs, competition and consumer psychology. This paper presents experimental evidence that, for at least some purchase situations, consumers' expectations...

The purpose of this article is to propose a new framework for examining the relationship between the consumer and the product, focusing not on the benefits the consumer seeks to maximize, but on the other side of the ledger—the costs the consumer seeks to minimize. These costs tend to fall...