Raising the Price of Agreement: Public Commitment and the Lowball Compliance Procedure1

Three studies examined the effect on compliance when a requester raises the price of the request. Participants in Experiment 1 were told that they would receive a free coffee mug for donating money to a fundraiser but were interrupted before they could respond and were told that the fundraisers were out of mugs. These participants were less likely to donate money than a group told nothing about the mugs. Experiments 2 and 3 compared this interruption procedure with the lowball procedure, which also uses a small-to-large price progression. The results from these two studies indicate that allowing people to respond to the initial price is critical for producing the lowball effect. Without a statement of public commitment, the small-to-large price progression led to a decrease rather than an increase in compliance relative to a control group. A chain of art supply stores recently introduced a sale in which the price of the item was lowest during the first hour of the day, and then went up 10% each hour. One can imagine the satisfaction that buyers felt during the initial hour of the sale, but what about subsequent customers? Restaurants often promote grand openings with coupons for remarkably low prices on meals. The bargains probably bring additional diners through the doors, but will these customers return to pay full price for the same meal? Many distributors offer cellular phones for free or extremely low prices. People who fail to read the fine print soon discover that these inexpensive phones come with several additional costs that push the final price far beyond what they expected. Will these surprised customers purchase the phones anyway?