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
