Marketing Ph.D. candidate examines pricing patterns and wins prize for his work.

Shazad Mustapha Mohammed (BBA ’99) receives his award from Hooman Estelami
and Sarah Maxwell (Ph.D. ’97), associate professors of marketing and co-directors
of the Fordham Pricing Center.

Have you ever based a purchase decision on a price comparison in the store? Or wondered if the products that weren’t marked were more expensive?

Shazad Mustapha Mohammed (BBA ’99), who majored in international business and marketing in the College of Business Administration and now is a doctoral candidate in marketing, has brought scholarly attention to the question. And his explorations brought him to the attention of the judges for the 2005 Doctoral Dissertation Competition, sponsored by the Fordham University Pricing Center.

Five pricing researchers judged dissertation proposals from entrants from all over the world and leading universities in the United States. The 2005 panel awarded Mohammed first prize. The distinction carried a $1,000 cash prize and gave him the opportunity to present his dissertation proposal—“An Examination of Within-Category Effects Versus Across-Category Effects of Partially Comparative Pricing”—at a conference this past November at the Fordham University Pricing Center.

“I am looking at consumer reactions to partially comparative prices within a product category,” Mohammed said. “For example, if a retailer provides a price comparison for one brand of aspirin, will consumers think that other aspirin brands at the retailer that do not have a price comparison are also well priced, or will they infer that they are more expensive?”

Mohammed’s work builds on an earlier study, one of whose authors was Paul Miniard, BMI Professor of Marketing in the College and director of Mohammed’s dissertation committee.

“Our study showed that when products in different categories have partially comparative pricing, consumers have an unfavorable reaction to those that aren’t compared,” Miniard said. “Shazad has shifted the attention to products within the same category and hypothesizes a different reaction from consumers.”

Making the presentation helped Mohammed refine his inquiry, as did defending the proposal to his dissertation committee.

“My defense occurred after I submitted the proposal to the competition,” he said. “Between then and my conference presentation, the paper gained complexity, becoming broader in some areas and deeper in others because of the input from my dissertation committee.

Presenting at the conference enabled him to sharpen the topic even further.

“Attendees were specialists in pricing from all over and it was a wonderful opportunity to interact with and get information from them,” he said.

“Shazad was really great, giving a very professional presentation,” said Sarah Maxwell (Ph.D. ’97), co-director of the Fordham University Pricing Center, who earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania and her master’s degree at the Wharton School. She also wrote her dissertation on pricing at Florida International University. “He did both his dissertation chair and the University proud. It’s always nice when you give an award to someone who is so obviously deserving.”

According to Maxwell, the Fordham Pricing Center, founded in 1997, is the only Center in the world devoted to research into the behavioral aspects of pricing. The dissertation proposal competition began in 2000 to recognize and promote interest in pricing research.

“We bring in more than fifty researchers from around the world, all working on the behavioral aspects of pricing—how people perceive, process, and act on pricing information,” she said.