Tied-goods pricing: Consumer decision-making and managerial implications

Consumers often evaluate tied goods—durable products paired with required complementary consumables—without fully integrating the total cost of ownership into their judgments. This research examines how consumers weigh durable versus complementary product costs and how this weighting differs depending on cost presentation and bundling format. Across three studies, consumers consistently placed greater emphasis on the durable product price and underweighted complementary costs, even when complementary cost increases resulted in equal or greater changes in total ownership cost. Study 1 shows that consumers are less responsive to changes in complement selling price than to comparable changes in the durable product price. Study 2 demonstrates that ongoing usage-based complement costs are further neglected, reflecting reduced attention to temporally extended expenses. Study 3 finds that bundling attenuates this asymmetry by reducing the salience of separate price components and prompting heuristic value judgments. Together, these findings advance understanding of consumer pricing evaluation in tied-goods systems and offer implications for the design of bundling and captive pricing strategies.