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Introduction
Traditional pricing research has its roots in economics, marketing and accounting. This pricing review concentrates on pricing research in marketing and especially on consumer behavior in pricing, a topic called behavioral pricing . Behavioral pricing adds a psychological and behavioral perspective to pricing research and uses theories from social cognition and behavioral decision research.
Because the term behavioral pricing is fairly new, no clear conceptualization of it exists. According to Miyazaki (2003, p. 471):
Psychology of pricing constitutes an expansive subset of pricing research wherein prices and pricing are examined with respect to their human elements - that is, with respect to how humans attend to, perceive, process, and evaluate price information, as well as how they go about determining the price at which a particular item should be sold or purchased.
Over the years, reviews of pricing research in marketing have focused on many different aspects in pricing, such as pricing strategy (Monroe and Della Bitta, 1978; Rao, 1984; Tellis, 1986), economics (Nagle, 1984) and degree of influence of pricing research in marketing (Leone et al. , 2012). There have been reviews of behavioral pricing, but some of them are relatively old (Gijsbrechts, 1993; Gourville, 1999; Monroe, 1973; Winer, 1988) or are specific to a certain field, such as hospitality management (Parsa and Njite, 2008).
Despite the existing reviews, there is still no clear understanding of the core of behavioral pricing. The main purpose of this review is to provide an overview of behavioral pricing research, including the identification of the primary areas studied and a summary of the core findings in each, based on previous literature. To this end, this review structures behavioral pricing research, introduces the main research areas and describes the evolution of the field.
To address these objectives, this study uses traditional literature review and research profiling methods. First, research profiling (Porter et al. , 2002) gives the "big picture" of literature on the topic. Research profiling is possible because of modern search engines, electronic science databases and sophisticated text mining tools. The idea behind research profiling is to review a topic on a larger scale. Second, traditional literature review characterizes the main themes studied in behavioral pricing and describes the key concepts of the field.
This review consists...