When retailers wait to reveal prices, shoppers fill in the blanks

Sometimes the price wasn't missing; its disclosure was just delayed. That's what Minzhe Xu, assistant professor of marketing in Iowa State University's Ivy College of Business, and his fellow researchers noticed when shopping online. A growing number of retailers were asking shoppers to take one more step—add to cart to see price, click to reveal, sign in to view price—before revealing an item's cost. The paper is published in the Journal of Consumer Research.