A Way Around the Left-Digit Bias? The Role of Mental Number Representations in Rounding Decisions

Why are consumers’ price judgments anchored on prices’ leftmost digits and when do people round fractional prices (e.g., $2.99 to $3.00) during mental computations? Three experiments show that increasing the saliency of analog representations or reducing the saliency of symbolic representations can influence rounding. Increasing the saliency of analog representations through an unrelated picture-matching task increases the propensity to round fractional numbers during mental computations (Study 1). Reducing the saliency of symbolic representations through memory-based processing also increases the propensity to round fractional numbers (Study 2 and Study 3). Implications for the left-digit bias in price evaluations are discussed.