To Profit or to Assist? How the Interplay Between Product Recommendations and Relative Prices Impacts Consumers’ Inferences and Choice

Clicks: 8
ID: 320706
2026
Free PDF
Article Quality & Performance Metrics
Overall Quality
Not rated
Combines reader engagement with the AI quality analysis. This article has not been analysed, so there is no overall score — reader engagement is measured and shown alongside.
AI Quality Assessment
Not analyzed
Readership in this journal
Emerging

Ranked #12 of 197 articles by views in journal of consumer research

Most read Least read

Bar heights use a square-root scale. Only the 120 most-read articles are drawn; the journal has 197 in total.

Mint this article as an NFT
Not yet minted

Create a permanent, verifiable on-chain record of this article on the Scimatic Network. The NFT is held in your Journament account, and you can withdraw it to your own wallet at any time.

5 SUSD one-off · no wallet required
Sign in to mint
Abstract
Abstract This article explores the interplay between company-based product recommendation and the product’s relative price. Eight studies demonstrate that consumers are sensitive to the relative price of the recommended option and are more likely to follow the recommendation as its relative price in the choice set decreases. We show that this occurs because consumers use the relative price of the recommended option as a cue for the company’s underlying motives. That is, because consumers generally believe that companies profit more from selling expensive products, they infer that when a company recommends a higher-priced product, its main motivation for doing so is to maximize its profit. Such skepticism about the company’s true motive reduces the likelihood that consumers follow the recommendation. The effect is observed across different types of product categories (hedonic or utilitarian), platforms (offline or online), and recommendations (human- or algorithm-based). Consistent with the proposed account, the effect attenuates when the recommendation comes from an independent and reliable source, when the price-profit link is weakened (i.e., when consumers learn the dissociation between price and profit), when the recommendation is believed to be a signal for popularity, and when consumers have a low innate tendency to question the company’s motivation.
Reference Key
openalex_W7168029375 Use this key to autocite in the manuscript while using SciMatic Manuscript Manager or Thesis Manager
Authors Kyuree Kim, Rom Y. Schrift
Journal journal of consumer research
Year 2026
DOI
10.1093/jcr/ucag020
URL
https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucag020
Keywords Keywords not found

Citations

No citations found. To add a citation, contact the admin at info@scimatic.org

Comments

No comments yet. Be the first to comment on this article.