6. Contributions
(1) Our findings offer contributions to the cross-cultural, price perceptions, and need for structure
literatures. Previous cross-cultural research has primarily focused on the individualism–collectivism
dimension, even though power distance was the first cultural dimension identified by Hofstede (1984).
(2) Our work contributes to the price-quality literature by identifying a novel
mechanism that causes people to use price to judge quality—that of need for structure. Our work also
suggests that the tendency to infer quality from price may not be a marketing universal, as claimed by
some researchers (Dawar and Parker 1994).
(3) We also contribute to the literature on need for structure by demonstrating that it (1) triggers greater
reliance on price to judge a product’s quality and (2) is responsible for the link between power distance
belief and price-quality judgments.
That is, we show that the tendency of higher (vs. lower) need for structure consumers to see the world in two- (vs. three-) dimensional terms (Schaller et al. 1995) leads them to be more likely to make price-quality judgments.
7. Future research
(1) Future research should also use field experiments to examine the robustness of our results.
(2) Future research should ascertain this relationship and also explore whether price salience can be manipulated using numeric information other than price.
(3) Future research should also explore how other cultural factors (e.g., masculinity–femininity, uncertainty orientation) impact price-quality judgments. Product category knowledge (Rao and Monroe 1988) and ease of evaluation of the product category (i.e., whether it is information versus credence good; Nelson 1970) are also boundary conditions deserving of future exploration.
8. Limitation
(1) First, we examined price-quality judgments in only a few product categories.
(2) Moreover, the studies were conducted in controlled environments, with limited information about
attributes other than price.
(3)In addition, we found that enhancing (reducing) the salience of price increases (decreases) price-quality
judgments among low (high) power distance belief participants.