Monday, April 28, 2008

Raising Price to Increase Demand

As anyone who has taken even the most basic economics class knows, increasing price leads to a drop in quantity demanded. Well, not always. Sometimes (as noted in a prior post), price may be interpreted as a signal of quality by consumers, and they might actually get greater utility from the same good with a higher price.

Here's some evidence reported in Business Week from a study by researchers at Stanford and the California Institute of Technology. Subjects were placed in an MRI and drank samples of the same wine with different price tags. The subjects liked the "more expensive" wines better, a finding supported by increased activity in the prefrontal cortex of the brain.

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