Can attempts to delight customers with surprise gains boomerang? A test using low-price guarantees

Despite cautionary advice against it, delighting consumers by offering them pleasant surprises is widely advocated. In this paper, using a low-price guarantee context, we show that retailers’ attempts to use surprise gains to delight consumers might lead to subpar outcomes, if a countervailing cognition such as suspicion of retailer opportunism dominates consumers’ thinking. In a low-price guarantee, retailers promise consumers refunds if...