It seems like the coffee mug experiment has been coming up everywhere these days. In fact, one of my classes attempted to reconstruct the experiment. Rather than a coffee mug, the professor placed a Bucky Badger glass up at the front of the classroom and had half the class fill out a questionnaire saying "would you sell the mug to someone for X" where X started at $1 and increased by $1 with each question. The other half of the class filled out a questionnaire that said "would you buy the mug for X." However at the end of the experiment the professor claimed "you're all MBA students, so you're too clever for this experiment" because the mean selling price and buying price were identical.
My previous experience with this experiment however actually gave the sellers coffee mugs to hold in their hands. This experiment got the expected finding: the sellers wanted to sell it for a much higher price than the buyers would buy it for.
This key difference occurred to me after class was over: touching the mug itself. It reminded me of the work of Joanne Peck (a UW professor of course) researching the effect of touch in marketing. If the sellers could have touched that water glass (without letting the buyer's touch it of course) would the results still have come out this same or are MBAs just too clever for these well-known experiments? Experimentally though, you could also take the issue with the questionnaire being too leading and asking a single shot "how much would you sell the glass for" might prevent the participants from overthinking their responses.
(Note: my first run in with the experiment was in undergrad, so perhaps we just weren't that clever yet...)
My previous experience with this experiment however actually gave the sellers coffee mugs to hold in their hands. This experiment got the expected finding: the sellers wanted to sell it for a much higher price than the buyers would buy it for.
This key difference occurred to me after class was over: touching the mug itself. It reminded me of the work of Joanne Peck (a UW professor of course) researching the effect of touch in marketing. If the sellers could have touched that water glass (without letting the buyer's touch it of course) would the results still have come out this same or are MBAs just too clever for these well-known experiments? Experimentally though, you could also take the issue with the questionnaire being too leading and asking a single shot "how much would you sell the glass for" might prevent the participants from overthinking their responses.
(Note: my first run in with the experiment was in undergrad, so perhaps we just weren't that clever yet...)
RSS Feed