The impact of price-quality relationship on the romanian consumers

Abstract

The economic literature from the middle of the XXth century underlined the fact that the price is the most relevant indicator of a product’s quality, arguing that when various goods are heterogeneous from the quality’s point of view and when their prices are significantly different, the consumers correlate the monetary sacrifice to the level of the quality. The present paper offers strong arguments that partially contradict this idea, the empirical support being represented by a study conducted by us, with the help of a questionnaire, on a sample of 500 Romanian consumers. The results obtained after the statistical tabulation of the data reveal the fact that most of the investigated persons consider that the goods with high prices do not have always a superior quality, but only sometimes. The conclusion of the study strongly sustains the idea according to which, only in the absence of other information about a product, the individuals will largely base the quality evaluation of the good on price, sometimes even overestimating the intensity of the relationship between the two indicators