【厦门韦博英语】流行新词:什么是"左位数效应"?

去超市买东西的时候，标价2.99元的商品似乎总是比3元的商品受欢迎。市场销售圈的人管这叫“左位数效应”。说的是，人们购物时只关注价签最左侧的数字，只要这个数字在自己承受范围之内，后面的数字就不会太在意了。

A new study, published in the latest issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, shows that anoccurrence known by marketers as the “left-digit effect” drastically influences the choices that people make while buying various items. Simple experiments have proven that too little attention is paid to the digit on the right hand side of a price tag. For instance, people would rather buy something that is priced at $3.99 than those priced at $4.00. In actual stores, this is encouraged, as producers and managers have the final two numbers of the price printed with much smaller fonts than the first one or two.

“Shoppers pay a disproportionate amount of attention to the leftmost digits in prices and these leftmost digits impact whether a product's price is perceived to be relatively affordable or expensive,” the study says.