Open Access

Hanna Greger

• Knowledge about consumer buying behavior is of high importance to companies. Being able to accurately identify customers' willingness to pay (WTP) helps to optimize one of a company's core goals - to make profit. The objective of this study is to apply the implicit method NeuroPricing Online to an example in the tourism sector in order to be able to determine the buying behavior of consumers and their WTP more precisely. In a bottom-up data mining approach, individual attitudes towards several price points for a given product of the vacation resort "Weissenhäuser Strand" were determined by means of reaction time measurement. We were then able to model curves with price points per product and their corresponding individual response times per product. The Feel-Good Price (FGP) as well as the Area under the curve (AUC) of an individual provide information about a subject's WTP for a given product. Using independent two-sample t-tests, we found that gender has an influence on WTP for some products. In addition, we found a difference between subjects who have previously visited the "Weissenhäuser Strand" and those who have not for some products. AUC average is larger for those who have already visited the resort than for those who have not. Furthermore, we examined the factors age and personality traits for their effect on subjects' purchasing behavior. However, none of these correlation analyses showed a significant relationship with FGP or AUC. These results suggest that the "Weissenhäuser Strand" should specifically advertise to different groups of people in order to increase profits and skillfully apply the different WTP of some groups as a basis for pricing. In addition, the study shows that the implicit method of response time measurement is sufficient for investigations in purchasing behavior in general, and that NeuroPricing Online has the potential to become a valuable tool for sophisticated pricing in the future.