Exploring anchoring effect and the moderating role of repeated anchor in electronic commerce

Most of the anchoring studies conduct the experiments following two-stage experimental design in which a comparative judgement is followed by an absolute estimate. However, this design is impractical in many situations, especially in online auction environments where consumers cannot be asked to make comparisons before they make estimates. This study suggests and validates an alternative experimental design where no comparison process is needed to induce anchoring bias. Moreover, we postulate that repeated occurrence of anchoring points affect the strength of the anchoring effect on participants' price estimates. Two experiments were conducted to investigate the anchoring effect in both two-stage and one-stage designs. The results showed that the anchoring effect was robust under two-stage design, and repeated occurrence of the anchor did not reinforce the anchoring effect. Moreover, people's price estimates are susceptible to the anchoring effect even when they were not asked to make a comparative judgement before they determine the final estimate. However, the anchoring effect can be further consolidated when the anchor appears three times rather than once. Experimental design introduced in study 2 provides a promising website design direction and we suggest that high anchors should be embedded in a web page repeatedly to influence the buyers' value estimates to produce a premium.