Communicating Price Increases: A Systematic Review of Price Fairness and Consumer Responses

Abstract

When firms raise prices, customers assess both the financial loss and how the firm treats them. This systematic review synthesizes 48 journal articles assessed from full text, identified across four databases without a publication-year restriction. Single-reviewer screening and extraction yielded 26 core direct, 18 supporting, and four conceptual records across seven themes. Tests of cost and other causal explanations form the largest direct-evidence cluster. Their effects depend on perceived control, credibility, fit to the affected offering, and the magnitude of the increase. Disclosure, reference-price framing, and package downsizing change what customers see. Some improve immediate judgments in the tested settings; others raise concerns about comprehension or deception. Reputation and vulnerability chiefly inform fairness appraisals in this corpus; budgets and alternatives may constrain action, but their interactions with specific messages on observed behavior are largely untested. The proposed framework organizes relationships examined across separate studies. Experimental evidence chiefly supports effects on immediate fairness judgments. Evidence connecting those judgments to later behavior is less direct, and the proposed feedback path is conceptual. Fewer, more varied studies observe choice, demand, or attrition; none tests the full sequence from communication through judgment to behavior. Conceptual sources provide ideas rather than independent effect estimates.