Abstract

This study was to examine if price-quality association of consumers is in the actual market and if it is reasonable to infer from price-objective quality and price-perceived quality relations. Based on the analysed results, consumers didn't regard price as a sole indicator but revealed significant difference between price and perceived quality by the product category(high-involvement/low-involvement, high-priced/low-priced, durables/ non-durables). And we can find that price/quality relations are product-specific and weak in general. Price-quality relations appears to be significant difference by the product category(high-involvement/low- involvement). Based on the results, we can conclude that consumers were affected price-quality association by the product category. In other words, price level is an decisive factor of price/quality relations and quality index. Namely, we can consider that consumers recognize purchasing risk of high-priced product than that of low-priced product by a great deal.