ABSTRACT Most research on e-commerce has focused on deliberate rational cognition, yet research in psychology and marketing suggests that buying decisions may also be influenced by priming (a form of what Information Systems researchers have called digital nudging). We conducted seven experiments to investigate the impact of two types of priming (numeric priming and semantic priming) delivered through what appeared to be advertisements on an e-commerce website. We found that numeric priming had a small but significant effect on consumers’ willingness to pay when the value of the product was unclear, but had no effect when products displayed a manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) or a fixed selling price. Semantic priming had larger effects on willingness to pay and the effects were significant but smaller in the presence of an MSRP. Thus, the combination of numeric and semantic priming has a larger impact on consumers’ willingness to pay. Taken together, these experiments show that some of the research on numeric priming and semantic priming done in offline settings generalizes to e-commerce settings, but there are important boundary conditions to their effects in e-commerce that have not been noted in offline settings. In online auctions (e.g., eBay), sellers can influence customers to pay more for products whose value is unclear by displaying products with clearly labelled high prices alongside the products the consumer searched for. However, such tactics will have only minimal effects for auctions of products whose price is known (e.g., those with an MSRP) and no effects on products with clearly listed prices (e.g., Amazon).

中文翻译：

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数字助推：电子商务中的数字和语义启动

摘要 大多数电子商务研究都集中在有意识的理性认知上，但心理学和市场营销的研究表明，购买决策也可能受到启动（信息系统研究人员称之为数字轻推的一种形式）的影响。我们进行了七项实验，以研究通过电子商务网站上看似广告传递的两种类型的启动（数字启动和语义启动）的影响。我们发现，当产品价值不明确时，数字启动对消费者的支付意愿有很小但显着的影响，但当产品显示制造商建议零售价 (MSRP) 或固定销售价格时，则没有影响。语义启动对支付意愿的影响较大，并且在存在 MSRP 时影响显着但较小。因此，数字和语义启动的结合对消费者的支付意愿影响较大。综上所述，这些实验表明，在离线环境中进行的一些关于数字启动和语义启动的研究可以推广到电子商务环境，但它们在电子商务中的影响存在重要的边界条件，而在离线环境中并未注意到。在在线拍卖（例如 eBay）中，卖家可以通过在消费者搜索的产品旁边展示标有明确高价的产品，从而影响客户为价值不明的产品支付更多费用。但是，这种策略对价格已知的产品（例如，具有 MSRP 的产品）的拍卖只会产生很小的影响，而对具有明确列出的价格的产品（例如，亚马逊）没有影响。