Multiple market moralities: identifying distinct patterns in how consumers evaluate the fairness of price changes

Abstract

Abstract The default position in economic psychology is that consumers evaluate the fairness of firms' pricing strategies based on a widely shared schema of market morality, operationalized by analysing the average response within a respondent pool to a given price-change scenario. Conversely, drawing on economic and cultural sociology, we argue that there are multiple, distinctive schemas that pattern consumers’ moral evaluation of market pricing practices. We identify distinctive moral schemas by replicating and reanalysing scenarios from the foundational study of the fairness in pricing field (Kahneman et al., 1986) with a new online survey of American adults. Using correlational class analysis, we find respondents orient to one of four different configurations of moral judgement about price-change fairness: dual-entitlement principles, free-market proponents (and opponents), retail-labour domain specificity and procedural (un)fairness. This research gives analysts new tools for more precisely specifying variation in consumer moral sentiment and raises new questions about the causes, consequences and contours of multiple market moralities.