Manoj Thomas
Marketing scholar at Cornell's Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management. With Vicki G. Morwitz he published the 2005 paper on the left-digit effect in price cognition.
Who they are
Manoj K. Thomas is Demir Sabanci Professor of Marketing and Management at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, where he is also Senior Director of the EMBA and NYC programmes and Associate Dean of New York City Initiatives. His Cornell profile lists his research focus as behavioural pricing, numerical cognition, moral foundations theory and fair-market ideology. He holds a PhD from the Stern School of Business at New York University (2006).
Key papers
Thomas, M., & Morwitz, V. (2005). Penny wise and pound foolish: The left-digit effect in price cognition. Journal of Consumer Research, 32(1), 54-64. doi:10.1086/429600
The paper reports five experiments on when a nine-ending price is perceived as smaller than a price one cent higher.
Key ideas
The 2005 paper proposes that the leftmost digit of a price carries disproportionate weight. It reports that the perceived gap appears only when the leftmost digits differ, that it depends on numerical and psychological closeness of the compared prices, and that it appears with other multidigit numbers. See The Left-Digit Effect.
Sources
- Thomas, M., & Morwitz, V. (2005). Penny wise and pound foolish: The left-digit effect in price cognition. Journal of Consumer Research, 32(1), 54-64. doi:10.1086/429600
- Manoj K. Thomas, faculty profile, Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University.