The Effect of Red Background Color on Willingness-to-Pay: The Moderating Role of Selling Mechanism
Bagchi and Cheema investigate how a red background affects willingness to pay in auctions and in negotiations, using data from real online auctions and from laboratory experiments. A red background, against blue, produced higher bid jumps in auctions and lower price offers in negotiations. The process they report is that red induces aggression through arousal, and the selling mechanism changes the outcome by focusing people on competing against other bidders in an auction or against the seller in a negotiation. Aggression was higher with red than with blue or grey. Journal of record: Journal of Consumer Research 39(5), 2012.
Bagchi and Cheema investigate how a red background affects willingness to pay in auctions and in negotiations, using data from real online auctions and from laboratory experiments. A red background, against blue, produced higher bid jumps in auctions and lower price offers in negotiations. The process they report is that red induces aggression through arousal, and the selling mechanism changes the outcome by focusing people on competing against other bidders in an auction or against the seller in a negotiation. Aggression was higher with red than with blue or grey. Journal of record: Journal of Consumer Research 39(5), 2012.
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Bagchi, R., & Cheema, A. (2012). The Effect of Red Background Color on Willingness-to-Pay: The Moderating Role of Selling Mechanism. Journal of Consumer Research, 39(5). doi:10.1086/666466 https://doi.org/10.1086/666466