Precise prices beat 9.99 charm pricing in high-powered consumer experiments

Walk into any store, open any shopping app, and you will be surrounded by prices engineered down to the final digit: $9.99 charm prices, clean round figures like $10.00, and oddly specific tags such as $9.87. For decades, behavioral scientists have argued about which of these endings works best, and the evidence has been stubbornly inconclusive—sometimes even contradictory. Now a team of researchers at Leuphana University Lüneburg has delivered what the field has long lacked: two preregistered, high-powered experiments, totaling 729 participants, that put round, just-below, and precise prices head to head across four key consumer outcomes. The results, published in Frontiers in Behavioral Economics, upend a long-standing assumption about the power of the 9-ending price.

The research, led by Yannik A. Escher with Eve Sarah Troll, Marie-Lena Henjes, and David D. Loschelder, was motivated by a simple observation: most prior work on price endings has focused almost exclusively on the contrast between just-below prices ($9.99) and round prices ($10.00), while precise prices—those with non-zero trailing digits—have been massively under-researched. Meanwhile, recent evidence shows that these three price formats differ systematically in their prevalence across countries and e-commerce platforms. A pre-study by the team, scraping 12,496 prices from Amazon, eBay, and supermarkets in the United States and Germany, found that just-below prices dominated at 66.18 percent, but precise prices accounted for a substantial 22.74 percent, and round prices 11.08 percent. If different endings are used differently across markets, understanding the consumer-level mechanisms behind them becomes essential.

The theoretical stakes are high. Two broad accounts compete to explain price-ending effects. Level effects, also called underestimation effects, hold that consumers psychologically shrink certain prices: they round $14.99 down to $14.00, compare digits one by one and stop at the first difference, or memorize only the leftmost digits that carry the highest monetary value. A recent meta-analysis found a moderate underestimation effect for just-below versus round prices. Image effects, by contrast, propose that endings carry meaning: a just-below price signals a sale or the lowest price on the market, while simultaneously suggesting lower product quality, since consumers have internalized the positive relationship between price magnitude and perceived quality. For precise prices, the literature offered two diametrically opposed predictions. Attribution-of-competence theorizing suggests that a precise price signals exactness, calculation, and accuracy—buyers should assume it more faithfully reflects the product’s true value. Processing-fluency theory predicts the opposite: round prices are more fluently processed, elicit a feeling of being right, and should therefore be preferred.

Study 1 was a rigorously controlled 3 (price ending) × 6 (product) mixed-design experiment with 290 German students randomly assigned to see round, just-below, or precise prices for six everyday products: a sofa, smoothie maker, bike lock, floor lamp, projector, and backpack. The design, hypotheses, and analysis plan were preregistered on the Open Science Framework before data collection, and a G*Power analysis targeting 90 percent power meant the final sample of 284 achieved a true power of 98.91 percent for the assumed effect size. Participants rated purchase intention, price image, and quality image on 7-point scales, and then—crucially—were asked to recall the prices they had seen, allowing the researchers to measure both recall accuracy and underestimation. In the precise condition, half the participants saw prices slightly lower and half slightly higher than the round prices, so that outcome differences could not be driven by mere price magnitude.

The findings were striking. Precise prices produced the most favorable price image of all three endings, significantly better than both round and just-below prices, with a medium effect size. Just-below and round prices did not differ from each other on price image—a result that directly challenges the classical assumption that 9-ending prices generate superior discount signals. Even more dramatic were the recall results: round prices were recalled correctly 84 percent of the time, just-below prices only 13 percent, and precise prices a mere 4 percent. Underestimation followed the reverse pattern: precise prices were underestimated in recall 65 percent of the time, just-below prices 44 percent, and round prices just 11 percent. The effect sizes here were enormous, with the price-ending factor explaining over 80 percent of the variance in correct recall.

Yet the endings that shaped memory and price perception did not move the outcomes marketers care about most directly. Price endings had no reliable effect on quality image or purchase intention in Study 1—the statistical effects were vanishingly small and non-significant. This null result matters because a recent meta-analytic review by the same group established that the vast majority of prior price-ending studies were neither preregistered nor adequately powered, and that publication bias analyses suggest corrected effects are much smaller than previously reported, close to null. The absence of direct effects on purchase intentions and quality perceptions may reflect habituation to common pricing practices, or the possibility that price endings alone provide insufficient information to shape broader product evaluations.

Exploratory mediation analyses added a crucial layer of nuance. When the researchers modeled how price image, quality image, and underestimated recall jointly transmitted the price-ending effect to purchase intentions, only the pathway through price image was significant. The indirect effects through quality image and recall-based underestimation were not. In other words, the relative advantage of precise prices appears to operate through the image a price conveys—fairness, accuracy, diagnostic value—rather than through consumers mentally shrinking the number or inferring product quality from its ending.

Study 2 replicated these findings with 439 additional participants and extended the paradigm by adding comparison prices, the prices of four comparable products shown alongside each target. The logic was that price-ending effects might be particularly pronounced when target prices are juxtaposed with non-matching round comparison prices. The replication was clean: precise prices again evoked the best price images, round prices were again recalled most accurately (65 percent versus 26 percent for just-below and 1 percent for precise), and precise prices were again most underestimated (60 percent versus 38 percent and 15 percent). Quality image and purchase intention again showed no reliable price-ending effects. Interestingly, comparison prices mattered in their own right: purchase intentions were higher when round comparison prices were shown rather than matching ones, and round comparison prices also boosted both price image and quality image. The exploratory moderated mediation analysis showed that the indirect effect of precise prices through price image was significantly stronger when round comparison prices surrounded the target—adding preliminary evidence that the price context in the direct vicinity of a product shapes how its ending is perceived.

The authors are careful about the boundaries of their claims. The experiments relied on student samples and imagined buying situations rather than consequential field behavior, and the mediation and moderation analyses were exploratory rather than confirmatory. The researchers also acknowledge that it remains unclear whether the advantage of precise prices stems from basic cognitive and emotional processes such as processing fluency or from more complex attribution effects known from decision-making and negotiation research, where precise anchors have been shown to boost the anchoring potency of first offers. Future work could compare different categories of precise endings, examine moderators like decision context and price level, and test whether price-ending effects differ across product categories, as supplementary analyses suggest they might.

Still, the implications for advertising and e-commerce are tantalizing. The overabundance of just-below prices in modern markets may have weakened the price-image effects reported in earlier decades, and past pricing effects should be interpreted cautiously, as they may have been overestimated in size and may depend heavily on the surrounding price context. The finding that scarcely researched precise prices can shape consumer price perceptions—particularly when juxtaposed with round comparison prices—opens a genuinely new avenue for pricing strategy. Precise prices are unlikely to constitute a panacea, and they should not be applied indiscriminately, but the research identifies behavioral foundations of price-ending effects at the level of individual consumer judgment that complement recent macro-level evidence on cross-cultural differences in pricing practices. The humble final digit, it turns out, still carries psychological weight—just not in the way the charm-pricing playbook has long promised.

Subject of Research: Behavioral Economics

Article Title: How consumers evaluated precise, just-below, and round prices: evidence from two high-powered, preregistered experiments

Article References: Escher, Y. A., Troll, E. S., Henjes, M.-L., & Loschelder, D. D. (2026). How consumers evaluated precise, just-below, and round prices: evidence from two high-powered, preregistered experiments. Frontiers in Behavioral Economics, 5, Article 1828446. https://doi.org/10.3389/frbhe.2026.1828446

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frbhe.2026.1828446

Keywords: price endings, precise prices, just-below prices, charm pricing, consumer psychology, behavioral economics, pricing strategy, preregistered experiments, consumers, evaluated, precise, just-below