Price Liking Scale

1. Abstract

The Price Liking Scale (PLK) is a specialized psychometric instrument developed by Keith S. Coulter and Dhruv Grewal (2014) designed to assess consumers’ subjective, immediate, and affective liking toward a specific listed sale price. Unlike traditional pricing evaluation scales that primarily capture cognitive, deliberative, or transactional appraisals—such as perceived financial value, deal fairness, price fairness, or perceived sacrifice—the Price Liking Scale isolates the affective component of price reception independent of semantic rationale or analytical justification. Grounded in the socio-psychological framework of implicit egotism and dual-process theories of cognition, the instrument quantifies subtle, spontaneous evaluations triggered by specific numeric arrangements, such as birthday-matching digits, name-letter correspondences, or phonological fluencies in pricing presentations. Psychometrically, the instrument utilizes a brief multi-item semantic differential and rating structure, typically configured across 2 to 3 targeted items evaluated along 7-point scales (e.g., assessing general liking, favorability, and positive emotional resonance toward the numeric price). Across empirical investigations conducted by Coulter and Grewal, the instrument exhibited robust internal consistency, yielding Cronbach’s alpha coefficients consistently exceeding .85 to .90 across experimental laboratory samples and online panels. Confirmatory factor analyses establish a distinct unidimensional affective factor that demonstrates convergent validity with consumer purchase intentions and willingness to pay, while maintaining sharp discriminant validity against cognitive constructs such as quality perception and economic deal assessment. The PLK provides marketing scholars, behavioral economists, and consumer psychologists with a rigorous, non-intrusive metric to measure pre-reflective hedonic responses to numeric stimuli.

2. Keywords

Price Liking Scale, implicit egotism, price perception, behavioral pricing, affective price evaluation, consumer psychology, numeric cognition, dual-process theory, pricing fluency, willingness to pay

3. Authors

The Price Liking Scale was conceptualized and validated by two leading scholars in marketing and consumer psychology:

• Keith S. Coulter, Ph.D.: Professor of Marketing at the Graduate School of Management, Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, United States. Dr. Coulter’s foundational research investigates behavioral pricing, numeric fluency, advertising effectiveness, and consumer cognition.
• Dhruv Grewal, Ph.D.: Toyota Chair in Commerce and Electronic Business and Professor of Marketing at Babson College, Babson Park, Massachusetts, United States. Dr. Grewal is widely recognized for his pioneering contributions to value pricing, retail strategy, consumer decision-making, and service pricing dynamics.

Academic correspondence regarding the foundational validation studies of the scale is conventionally addressed to the authors via their institutional departments or through the publication archives of the Journal of Marketing published by the American Marketing Association.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Price Liking Scale is to capture the instantaneous, affective, and visceral reaction that an individual experiences when confronted with a discrete numeric price display. In consumer behavior literature, traditional pricing models operate on the classical economic assumption that price acts primarily as an informational cue indicating economic sacrifice or perceived product quality. Decades of research in behavioral economics and neuroeconomics, however, have revealed that consumers do not process numbers purely as rational accountants; instead, numeric stimuli trigger immediate affective reactions prior to any deliberate cost-benefit analysis.

Coulter and Grewal (2014) introduced this operationalization to measure how implicit associations—specifically, the phenomenon of implicit egotism, wherein people are unconsciously drawn to things that resemble aspects of the self (such as their birthday digits or name-letters)—manifest in pricing contexts. The purpose of developing an explicit “liking” scale rather than relying on global purchase intention or cognitive perceived value was to disentangle the immediate emotional valence attached to the numeric string itself from broader evaluations of the product, brand prestige, or category utility.

In applied and academic research contexts, the PLK fulfills several critical diagnostic functions:

• Isolating Affective Processing in Pricing: The scale enables researchers to test whether pricing nudges, font styling, phonetic rhyming, or numerical synchronicity increase market demand via cognitive belief revision or through pure, direct affective preference.
• Evaluating Implicit Egotism and Personalization: The tool allows experimentalists to test self-referencing effects (e.g., prices matching an individual’s anniversary, age, or birthdate) by capturing the affective uplift that arises without explicit conscious awareness.
• Dissecting Behavioral Anomalies: It provides a standardized metric to evaluate consumer resistance to non-standard price endings (e.g., $49.83 versus$49.99), odd-even pricing, and charm pricing mechanisms.
• Serving as a Critical Mediating Variable: In structural equation modeling (SEM), the PLK frequently serves as a direct mediator between experimental price manipulation and downstream behavioral outcomes, such as brand choice, customer satisfaction, and actual transaction completion.

5. Psychological Construct

The core construct measured by the Price Liking Scale is affective price valence, defined as the degree of positive emotional orientation, pleasantness, and psychological attraction an individual holds toward a specific numeric price point. This construct is theoretically multidimensional in conceptualization but functionally unidimensional in psychometric execution.

Affective Valence vs. Cognitive Assessment

To understand the construct, it is necessary to differentiate affective price liking from cognitive pricing evaluations. In consumer psychology, cognitive assessments involve propositional judgments such as “This price is fair,” “This product is inexpensive relative to its category,” or “This price indicates superior manufacturing quality.” These evaluations require cognitive deliberation, reference-price retrieval from long-term memory, and mental arithmetic. In stark contrast, price liking operates at the associative level: an intuitive, immediate “feeling” of pleasantness or aversion. A consumer may cognitively acknowledge that a luxury item is overpriced while simultaneously experiencing a high level of affective liking toward an elegant, rounded number ($1,000.00), or conversely, experience an instinctive affinity toward a price t\hat matches their birth date (e.g.,$24.11 for someone born on November 24th), even if the price offers no objective economic advantage.

Dimensions of the Evaluative Phenomenon

Within the psychometric architecture of the construct, three primary facets are captured across the scale’s items:

• General Hedonic Affinity: The overarching baseline of whether the price evokes an immediate sensation of liking versus disliking. This captures the primary affective orientation toward the numerical stimulus.
• Favorability Appraisal: The degree to which the numeric presentation is perceived as intrinsically positive, appealing, or agreeable, bridging initial emotional resonance with dispositional acceptance.
• Positive Affective Alignment: The subjective feeling of pleasantness associated with the listed price, reflecting absence of psychological friction, price shock, or cognitive dissonance.

Because these facets share an underlying latent source of variance—namely, spontaneous emotional valence—they coalesce into a unified, high-reliability latent factor.

6. Theoretical Framework

The Price Liking Scale is fundamentally situated at the intersection of three major psychological frameworks: Implicit Egotism Theory, Dual-Process Theories of Cognition, and Processing Fluency Theory.

Implicit Egotism Theory

Introduced by Pelham, Mirenberg, and Jones (2002), implicit egotism posits that humans possess an automatic, unconscious self-enhancement drive. People generally hold positive feelings about themselves; consequently, any stimulus that shares features with their identity (e.g., letters in their name, geographic locations sharing their initials, or numbers matching their birth date) automatically inherits a halo of positive affect. In Coulter and Grewal’s (2014) foundational work, this theory was extended to the financial domain. When a consumer encounters a price containing numerical sequences that match their birth date (e.g., a customer born on March 15 viewing a price of $3.15 or$31.50), implicit egotism is unconsciously triggered. The positive valence associated with the self is immediately transferred to the numeric string, resulting in elevated price liking. The PLK was formulated precisely to isolate and measure this transferred positive affect.

Dual-Process Theories of Cognition (System 1 vs. System 2)

Under dual-process models (such as those popularized by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky), human decision-making relies on two cognitive modes: System 1 (fast, automatic, effortless, associative, and emotionally driven) and System 2 (slow, deliberate, analytical, and rule-governed). Classical models of pricing assume that consumers evaluate prices using System 2, calculating percentages, comparing reference prices, and assessing financial utility. However, Coulter and Grewal demonstrated that numeric liking often emerges through System 1 operations. The Price Liking Scale assesses this immediate System 1 affective output before System 2 engages in deliberate economic calculation.

Processing Fluency Theory

Processing fluency theory asserts that stimuli that are easier for the human brain to perceive, process, and mentally represent generate a subjective feeling of ease that is unconsciously attributed to positive qualities of the object itself. Numeric combinations that possess mathematical rhythm, symmetry, or self-relevance are processed with higher conceptual and perceptual fluency. This fluency is experienced subjectively as a subtle, positive emotional state—a sensation directly measured by the Price Liking Scale.

7. Validity

Empirical evidence for the validity of the Price Liking Scale has been established across multiple rigorous empirical studies, structural equation models, and experimental replications.

Construct Validity

Construct validity is evidenced by the scale’s sensitivity to subtle numerical manipulations designed to elicit non-conscious preference shifts. In the validation experiments conducted by Coulter and Grewal (2014), the instrument systematically distinguished between prices containing self-referent numbers (e.g., matching participants’ birth months and days) and control prices of identical economic magnitude (e.g., $49.15 vs.$49.82). The scale demonstrated high factor loadings (> .80) across all items, establishing that the observed indicators share substantial variance with the underlying latent construct.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity has been established through substantial, statistically significant correlations with closely related consumer outcome metrics:

• Purchase Intentions: Across experimental studies, scores on the Price Liking Scale were strongly positively correlated with consumers’ stated willingness to purchase the featured products (correlations typically ranging between r = .52 and r = .68, p < .001).
• Willingness to Pay (WTP): When consumers reported higher price liking, their reservation prices and perceived deal acceptability expanded significantly.
• Brand Favorability: Price liking demonstrated positive, moderate correlations with general attitude toward the offering brand (r ≈ .40 to .50), reflecting the affective spillover from the price itself to the overarching product evaluation.

Discriminant Validity

Crucially, the scale exhibits rigorous discriminant validity against cognitive pricing constructs:

• Perceived Product Quality: In factor-analytic assessments utilizing the Fornell-Larcker criterion, the average variance extracted (AVE) for the Price Liking Scale consistently exceeded the squared correlation between price liking and perceived product quality (which typically remained modest at r < .30). This demonstrates that liking a price is distinct from assuming the product is poorly made or premium.
• Perceived Sacrifice: While perceived monetary sacrifice correlates inversely with purchase intent, price liking captures an affective pull that can operate even when financial sacrifice remains objectively identical across experimental conditions.

8. Reliability

The Price Liking Scale demonstrates strong internal consistency and measurement precision across laboratory and online consumer samples.

Internal Consistency

In the foundational investigations reported by Coulter and Grewal (2014), the scale demonstrated consistently high Cronbach’s alpha (α) coefficients across diverse experimental studies:

• Study 1: Initial testing of self-relevant pricing manipulations yielded a Cronbach’s alpha of α = .89.
• Study 2: Replicating the effect with birthday-matching pricing configurations produced an internal reliability of α = .91.
• Study 3 & Follow-Up Experiments: Subsequent replications across varying consumer product categories (e.g., electronics, consumer goods, apparel) reported reliability coefficients consistently falling between α = .86 and α = .93.

Composite reliability (CR) metrics calculated via structural equation modeling routinely surpass the recommended threshold of .70, typically exceeding .88, confirming that the scale indicators reliably measure the shared latent factor without excessive measurement error.

Test-Retest Stability

Because the instrument is primarily deployed in experimental contexts to gauge state-level affective reactions to specific numeric stimuli, test-retest reliability is context-dependent. However, when tested in control conditions where the target price is re-evaluated over short intervals (e.g., 20 to 40 minutes apart within identical testing sessions), the stability coefficient remains high (r > .80). In longer longitudinal intervals, ratings remain stable provided that contextual reference prices and consumer budget constraints remain invariant.

9. Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the Price Liking Scale has been evaluated using both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

When subjected to principal axis factoring or principal component analysis with varimax and oblimin rotations, the scale items reliably converge on a single, dominant factor:

• Eigenvalues: A single factor with an eigenvalue substantially greater than 1.0 (typically ranging from 2.2 to 2.6 for a 3-item configuration) accounts for between 75% and 86% of the total variance.
• Factor Loadings: Individual item loadings on this primary latent dimension are exceptionally high, ranging from .84 to .94, with no significant cross-loadings observed when evaluated alongside cognitive pricing items.
• Scree Plot Examination: Scree tests consistently reveal a pronounced drop-off after the first extraction, affirming a clean unidimensional factor structure.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Confirmatory factor models tested in structural equation modeling environments (e.g., AMOS, LISREL, Mplus, R lavaan) show that a single-factor affective model fits the empirical data exceptionally well:

• Standardized Factor Loadings (λ): All standardized loadings consistently exceed .80 (typically λ₁ = .88, λ₂ = .91, λ₃ = .85), indicating that each item captures a substantial portion of true score variance.
• Average Variance Extracted (AVE): The AVE consistently exceeds .70, comfortably surpassing the standard .50 benchmark for psychometric adequacy.
• Goodness-of-Fit Indices: Multi-sample structural models that include the PLK alongside purchase intentions and perceived value yield exemplary fit indices: Comparative Fit Index (CFI) ≥ .98; Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) ≥ .97; Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) ≤ .05; and Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) ≤ .03.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Price Liking Scale is structured as an efficient, self-administered survey tool suitable for inclusion in laboratory experiments, digital consumer surveys, and live field intercept studies.

• Test Type: Affective pricing evaluation instrument / Semantic differential & Likert-style self-report scale.
• Target Population: Adult consumers, retail shoppers, and experimental research participants exposed to pricing stimuli.
• Number of Items: Typically 2 to 3 core items (depending on experimental brevity requirements).
• Administration Time: Less than 1 minute (approximately 30 to 45 seconds).
• Response Format: Standardized on 7-point response scales (e.g., anchored by bipolar affective descriptors such as 1 = Dislike very much / Not at all favorable / Bad feeling to 7 = Like very much / Very favorable / Good feeling).
• Scoring Procedure:
  • All items are keyed in a positive direction; no reverse-coding is required when using standard positive polarity anchors.
  • An overall Price Liking Index is calculated by computing the unweighted arithmetic mean across the completed items:
    
    Price Liking Score = (Item 1 + Item 2 + Item 3) / 3
  • Possible composite scores range from 1.00 to 7.00, with higher scores reflecting greater positive affective liking toward the target price.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Price Liking Scale was introduced in 2014 in the seminal publication authored by Keith S. Coulter and Dhruv Grewal within the Journal of Marketing.

• Publication Year: 2014
• Copyright & Ownership: The scholarly article and its contents are copyrighted by the American Marketing Association (AMA).
• Licensing and Research Use: The scale is widely accessible within academic literature for non-commercial educational, scientific, and experimental research purposes under standard academic “fair use” conventions, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is cited.
• Commercial Applications: Commercial enterprises, proprietary market research organizations, or commercial software platforms seeking to integrate or distribute the scale commercially should consult the publisher’s permissions guidelines via the American Marketing Association or the Copyright Clearance Center.
• Fee: No licensing fee is charged for academic, non-commercial institutional research.

12. References

• Coulter, K. S., & Grewal, D. (2014). Name-letters and birthday-numbers: Implicit egotism effects in pricing. Journal of Marketing, 78(3), 102–120. https://doi.org/10.1509/jm.12.0163
• Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Pelham, B. W., Mirenberg, M. C., & Jones, J. T. (2002). Why Susie sells seashells by the seashore: Implicit egotism and major life decisions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82(4), 469–487. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.82.4.469
• Reber, R., Schwarz, N., & Winkielman, P. (2004). Processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure: Is beauty in the perceiver’s processing experience? Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8(4), 364–382. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0804_3
• Thomas, M., & Morwitz, V. (2005). Penny wise and pound foolish: The left-digit effect in price cognition. Journal of Consumer Research, 32(1), 54–64. https://doi.org/10.1086/429600
• Zeithaml, V. A. (1988). Consumer perceptions of price, quality, and value: A means-end model and synthesis of evidence. Journal of Marketing, 52(3), 2–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224298805200302

13. Items of the Scale