| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 商學研究所 === 94 === This research discusses the effects on consumers’ attitudes when firms raise the price of their products or service. Whether firms provide the reasons of their price increase behavior or not will influence consumers’ attitudes. Under the condition that firms do provide the price increase reasons, the firms’ controllability of these price increase reasons (high degree vs. medium degree vs. low degree) will influence consumers’ attitude, too. We also add the customer relationship type (communal vs. exchange relationship) as the moderator. We want to study how the relationship types between firms and customers will influence consumers’ attitudes toward price increase.
The empirical results show that: 1. When firms raise the price of their products or service, consumers will have better attitudes if firms have provided price increase reasons. 2. We find that consumers will have different attitudes toward different price increase reasons. Consumers have better attitudes and higher acceptance when the firms’ controllability degree of these price increase reasons are low and medium. 3. If we consider the relationship type between firms and customers, we find that different types of relationship will make customers’ attitudes different. Customers who have communal relationship with firms will have better attitudes and higher acceptance toward firms’ price increase behavior than those who have exchange relationship with firms. 4. We look at both firms’ controllability of these price increase reasons and the customer relationship types with firms on consumers’ attitude effects. We find that when firms’ have high controllability of price increase reasons, the attitudes of the two kinds
of consumers are the same. And when firms’ controllability of price increase reason is low degree, the attitudes of the two kinds of consumers also have no difference. But we notice that under the condition of medium degree controllability price increase reason, communal customers will have better attitudes and higher acceptance toward firms’ price increase behavior than exchange customers do.
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