“We were interested in whether considering the price first changed how people thought about the decision process, and whether it changed the way the brain coded the value of a product,” says Uma R. Karmarkar, a neuroscientist and assistant professor in the Marketing unit at Harvard Business School, who conducted the research with Baba Shiv, a marketing professor and neuroeconomics expert at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and Brian Knutson, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Stanford. “Because we had neuroscience tools at our disposal, we had the benefit of exploring both those questions,” Karmarkar says.

* * *

The results showed that the brain activity varied according to whether the participant had seen the price or product first. “The pattern of activity in the prefrontal cortex suggested to us that sequence matters: At the very simplest, the neural signals looked different when the price came first versus when the product came first,” Karmarkar says. “When the product came first, the decision question seemed to be one of ‘Do I like it?’ and when the price came first, the question seemed to be ‘Is it worth it?’ “

Read original article


Tags: