‘Pennies-a-Day’ 전략의 경계 조건:일별 제시 금액 크기의 역할

Abstract

Prior work on mental accounting showed that consumers prefer integration of small costs into one large bundled cost over experiencing them separately. By contrast, Gourville (1998) demonstrated that “Pennies-a-Day” (PAD) strategy, i.e., temporal reframing of a large one-time expense into a series of small ongoing expenses, can be more effective than aggregate framing in increasing transaction compliance. In this article, two experiments are reported that clarified a boundary for the effectiveness of the PAD strategy and the psychological processes induced by different daily payment amounts. In Experiment 1, we examined the conditions under which consumers prefer PAD over aggregate framing. The second experiment investigated the psychological processes associated with different levels of daily payment amount. The results demonstrated the moderating influence of daily payment amount on the temporal reframing effect: First, when daily payment amount is as small as the price of a trivial product such as a cup of coffee, PAD is preferred over aggregate framing. In the small daily payment amount condition, the PAD framing of a transaction facilitates comparisons with a small routine expense and consumers tend to consider the transaction acceptable. Second, in the moderate daily payment amount condition, participants also preferred PAD over aggregate framing. The verbal protocol revealed that they tend to calculate the approximate total price by simplifying the amount of payment and the number of payments. After the participants compare the approximate total price with their own reference price, they decided whether it was acceptable or not. Third, in the large daily payment amount condition, the participants preferred aggregate framing over the PAD framing. The verbal protocol analysis shows that they generated immediate negative responses to the large daily payment amount without calculating the total price. Then, they considered it as unacceptable. This indicates that the effectiveness of PAD strategy disappears when the daily payment amount becomes large enough to induce negative affect. The theoretical as well as practical implications are also discussed.