Sucharita Chandran

Who they are

Biography beyond the cited work is not recorded, by rule. The affiliation stated here, Boston University, is the one printed on the 2006 paper's record at the time of publication.

The documented footprint used for this page is two papers in the Journal of Consumer Research, a 2004 paper on how the framing of time changes judgements of health risk, and the 2006 paper on free promotions. Only the second is described here, because only its abstract was read.

Key papers

Chandran, S., & Morwitz, V. G. (2006). "The Price of 'Free'-dom: Consumer Sensitivity to Promotions with Negative Contextual Influences." Journal of Consumer Research, 33(3), 384-392. First author. Abstract read.

Chandran, S., & Menon, G. (2004). "When a Day Means More than a Year: Effects of Temporal Framing on Judgments of Health Risk." Journal of Consumer Research, 31(2), 375-389. First author. Cited by title only; no abstract was available and the paper was not read.

Key ideas

The 2006 paper begins from earlier work showing that monetary promotions, such as discounts, are more likely to be processed relative to the original product price and integrated with it than free promotions are. The authors posit that because of this difference, free promotions are more focal and salient than monetary promotions.

If that is right, there is a prediction to test. A salient offer should be harder to dislodge. The authors tested whether free promotions were less susceptible than equivalent monetary discounts to negative contextual information on quality, the kind of information that can lower purchase intentions. In a set of three experiments they found that they were. A free promotion held up better against bad news about quality than a discount of equal value did.

The paper then shows the limit of the effect. It can be reversed when respondents focus on other pieces of information that diminish the salience of the free promotion. That finding is what makes the account credible, because the explanation for the effect is salience, and the effect disappears when salience is taken away. A result that could be switched off by changing where attention goes is a result with an identifiable cause.

For a seller, the implication is two-sided. A free offer can protect a product from doubts about its quality at the moment of the offer, which is useful when a product has a weak point. It also means the offer works partly by taking attention away from the product itself, and that attention can be pulled back. A shopper who is asked a direct question about quality, or shown a review, is in the condition where the abstract says the advantage can reverse.

For a reader, the paper belongs beside two others in the vault. The 2007 paper by Kristina Shampanier, Nina Mazar and Dan Ariely found that people choose free products more often than cost-benefit reasoning predicts and named affect as the most likely reason. The 2013 paper by Mauricio Palmeira and Joydeep Srivastava found that a free offer devalues a product less than a low discounted price does, and explained it through selective accessibility. Chandran and Morwitz's account is a third description of the same underlying observation, that a free offer changes what people attend to. The three papers use different outcomes, purchase intentions in one, choice in another and willingness to pay in the third, so they should not be added together.

What this page cannot report is the detail of the experiments. It was written from the abstract, and it gives no samples, products, effect sizes or the nature of the negative information used. Those would need the paper.

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