I Paid More than You (Before)?! The Effects of Self-Construal and Comparison Target on Price Unfairness Perceptions

Previous research suggests that when consumers encounter discrepant prices due to dynamic pricing, a social comparison evokes stronger unfairness perceptions than a temporal comparison does. In this paper, the authors show how this effect may vary depending on consumers’ self-construal. Two experiments find that while independent consumers perceive stronger price unfairness when paying more than other consumers, interdependent consumers perceive stronger price unfairness when paying more than what they did in the past. These effects occur because consumers are differentially sensitive, as a function of their self-construal, to social versus temporal comparisons in their self-appraisal. Our results show that self-construal affects consumers’ means for maintaining their self-appraisal and alters the relevance of different comparison targets in price unfairness perceptions.