Abstract:

Scholars and companies have paid much attention on partitioned pricing since its emergence. This paper focus on the dark side of partitioned pricing, particularly on the effect of the event that customers find the actual total price is higher than the recalled total price. By questionnaire survey, we find that customer satisfaction, repurchase intension, positive word-of-mouth and customer trust will significantly reduce, if customers realize the underestimation of the total price because of partitioned pricing. No matter consumers self blame for this underestimation, most of them tend to attribute the underestimation to the firm. Moreover, compared with conditions in which consumers aware of the underestimation by themselves, those who are reminded by others will have poorer trust to the firm and lower repurchase intention.

Key words: Partitioned Price, Dark Side, Attribution, Situation