The Importance of Value Certainty in Assessing Multiple Items Simultaneously

Combining bundle items with different value certainty has lead to some remarkable outcomes, such as paying less for a pair of items than for one of the items in isolation (i.e. hyper-subadditivity). We show new evidence for the role of value certainty in that (a) participants consider the more certain item first, regardless of importance or price and (b) perceived retail item price showed an impact of the certain item on the uncertain item, but not vice versa. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that when people are making a decision about multiple items, that value certainty plays a critical role.

Citation:

John W. Pracejus, Peter T.L. Popkowski Leszczyc, and Yingtao Shen (2009) ,"The Importance of Value Certainty in Assessing Multiple Items Simultaneously", in AP - Asia-Pacific Advances in Consumer Research Volume 8, eds. Sridhar Samu, Rajiv Vaidyanathan, and Dipankar Chakravarti, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 245-246.