Diego Aparicio (IESE Business school, University of Navarra) 28.3.2024
It is our pleasure that Dr. Diego Aparicio (IESE Business School, University of Navarra) will present on Thursday, March 28, 2024, at 12:45 in room RB437 about the topic “Concealing Prices.”
Registration is not required and anyone who would like to attend is warmly invited.
It is also possible to participate online via MS Teams. To get access, please, contact lubomir.cingl@vse.cz.
The seminar is going to be engaging. Dr. Aparicio will be talking about price obfuscation in retail (very familiar to us as consumers), and both lab and field experiments. So, it appeals to both “quant” and “lab” researchers.
ABSTRACT: A popular tactic in retail is to delay the presentation of a product’s price. This practice has stood the test of time: window displays have invited shoppers to “ask inside for prices,” catalogues urge readers to “contact us for prices,” and recently online stores ask shoppers to “click to reveal prices” or “add to cart to see price.” This work reports a novel empirical test of this question long debated by business people across industries: Is it better to show my prices upfront or later in a purchase process? Specifically, the paper reports field and lab experiments in which prices were communicated to shoppers alongside the corresponding product or with a delay. These experiments show that delayed price disclosure can increase or decrease sales relative to immediate price disclosure. Importantly, these effects occur because delayed price disclosure influences the perception of price in purchase decisions. Collectively, these findings extend research on price obfuscation and the role of friction in shopping experiences.
BIO: Diego Aparicio is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at IESE Business School in Spain, Barcelona. He studies empirical questions in pricing, assortment, and consumer behavior decisions in areas of industrial organization and marketing. His work often uses large-scale datasets from field or lab experiments. Diego holds a PhD in Economics from MIT.
