Abstract: 

The overarching research question my PhD project seeks to answer is: “how do social pricing norms and the social component of a price affect price fairness judgments and consumer attitudes?”. Paper 1. examines price-setting and consumers’ expectations thereof in power-dependence relations. In the future, this paper may be extended to consider how the social embeddedness of a customer’s reference price and social orientation affects price expectations / perceived as fair prices. Paper 2. studies the transferability of consumer attitudes between brand alliance partners as a function of a price increase’s social acceptability. Paper 3. proposes that brand anthropomorphism interacts with social acceptability with respect to the perceived fairness of a price increase. Finally, Paper 4. identifies perceived community effects as a key determinant of gamers’ attitudes towards the microtransaction pricing model. Due to their perceived community effects, microtransactions birth perceptions of powerlessness vis-à-vis other consumers, which appears to sensitize gamers to concerns for social fairness.