(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.