Price Judgments in Advertising‐Funded Discounts: The Role of Legitimacy and Manipulative Intent

ABSTRACT Advertising‐funded discounts represent a growing form of multi‐party pricing in which consumers evaluate not only the discounted price but also the explanation for why the discount is offered. This research conceptualizes explicit discount explanations as exchange‐rationale framing with two levels: fair‐exchange framing, which presents the discount as a structural return of advertising revenue to consumers, and transactional framing, which presents it as a conventional promotional offer. Across two experiments, we examined how these framing conditions shaped purchase intention through two evaluative responses: perceived legitimacy and perceived manipulative intent. Fair‐exchange framing increased perceived legitimacy, which in turn enhanced purchase intention. Manipulative‐intent inferences, by contrast, were more context‐sensitive, emerging more clearly in utilitarian contexts, where they were associated with lower purchase intention. Consumers thus responded to advertising‐funded discounts through two parallel but asymmetric evaluative routes: a more consistently observed legitimacy‐based pathway and a more context‐sensitive manipulative‐intent pathway. By conceptualizing advertising‐funded discounts as exchange‐structure interpretation cues, this research complements price fairness research by examining consumers' evaluations of the acceptability of the exchange structure and extends persuasion knowledge theory to multi‐party pricing contexts.