On The Price Perception Dimension - American College Students' Consumer Comparative Study

Price is one of the very important competitive factors in the market between companies,especially in industries where product quality and service do not have significant difference. Although perceived quality has been identified as an important cause to customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, price is also a key dimension that customers would consider. Because no matter what kinds of good or service that people want to have, price represents not only the value of a good but also the economic benefit that people would sacrifice for it. As a result, in both academic research and the marketing strategy, the research of price is always an important subject. What do consumers think of price perception? In different cultures, are people's opinions about the seven dimensions of price different? The purpose of this research is to analyze whether Chinese and American college students'opinions about the seven dimensions affecting price perception are different or not, starting with the point of view about consumers'price perceptions. And the research also analyzes whether culture plays a role in students opinions about the seven dimensions.Firstly this article reviews former research literature on this aspect, summarizes academic research results on consumer price perception and consumer price perception models. Based on literature review, based on the fact that researches on this aspect are limited, we introduce Lichtenstein,Ridgway and Netemeyer's model of price perceptions. We also use Hofstede's culture framework, to format the model structure of this research. With the methods of qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis, the author distributed questionnaires to collect data for statistical analysis in order to test the seven hypotheses,namely, Chinese and American consumers'perceptions of seven dimensions of price are different.