Abstract

The correlation of customer satisfaction, purchase intention, purchase decision, and brand establishment are recently in-depth discussed in the most of previous studies and further, few studies specifically emphasize on the research of the effects of individual differences of cognition on reference price. This study takes tolerance of ambiguity as moderator variable aiming to examine the impact of different levels of tolerance of ambiguity on consumer cognition as consumers were provided with advertised reference price. The experiment was designed and conducted with the treatment of two factors and two levels. Furthermore, the data gathered was analyzed according to methodology of the t-test and the two-way ANOVA method. Results of this study indicated that offering reference price influenced consumers’ cognition of “shopping goods” rather than “convenience goods”, the promotion effectiveness of reference price correlated with different levels of tolerance of ambiguity on consumers’ cognition of “shopping goods”. Particularly, the goal of this study is to cross-analyze the individual differences of consumers and to further explore the correlation among individual differences, and the reference price. According to the results of this study, not only the enterprises are able to make the appropriate marketing strategy for consumers with a wide variety of personality traits and to enormously increase the sales volume.

Key words: Reference price, consumer personality, individual cognition, tolerance of ambiguity.