• Media type: E-Book
  • Title: Paying Too Much and Being Happy About it : Existence, Causes and Consequences of Tariff-Choice Biases
  • Contributor: Lambrecht, Anja [Author]; Skiera, Bernd [Author]
  • Published: [S.l.]: SSRN, 2008
  • Extent: 1 Online-Ressource (12 p)
  • Language: English
  • Origination:
  • Footnote: In: Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. XLIII, pp. 212-223, May 2006
  • Description: A common assumption underlying the analysis of consumers' choice between optional tariffs is that consumers choose the tariff that maximizes consumer surplus and, thus, the tariff that leads for a given amount of usage to the lowest billing rate. Yet, there is evidence that many users prefer a flat rate even though their billing rate would be lower on a pay-per-use tariff (flat-rate bias) and some users prefer a pay-per-use tariff even though they would save money on a flat rate (pay-per-use bias). The authors conduct four empirical analyses based on three different data sets. They show that the flat-rate bias is more important and has a greater regularity and time-persistence than the pay-per-use bias. They classify potential causes of the flat-rate bias as insurance effect, taxi meter effect, convenience effect, and overestimation effect and show that the insurance, the taxi meter and the overestimation effect lead to a flat-rate bias. They provide evidence that underestimation of usage is a major cause of the pay-per-use bias. They show that the flat-rate bias does not significantly increase customer churn and thus results in a short- and long-term profit increase. In contrast, the pay-per-use bias largely increases churn so that the additional short-term profit is in the long-term offset by higher churn
  • Access State: Open Access