Remembering versus Knowing: Issues in Buyers’ Processing of Price Information

Abstract

A traditional assumption concerning how prices influence buyers’ purchasing behaviors has been that buyers know the prices of the products and services that they consider for purchase. However, empirical research during the past four decades repeatedly has discovered that buyers often are not able to remember the prices of items they had recently purchased. One conclusion that has been drawn is that buyers often do not attend to price information in purchase decisions. The authors argue that this conclusion may be incorrect in that what consumers can explicitly remember is not always a good indicator of what they implicitly know. Price information not consciously remembered can still influence internal reference prices and product evaluations. In this article, the authors discuss the conceptual and methodological ramifications of the distinction between remembering and knowing to reassess and refine our understanding of how buyers process and use price information.