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Introduction
Marketing ± defined as a market-oriented management concept ± places the problems and wishes of actual and potential customers at the center of all operational considerations. According to this principle, the satisfaction of consumers' wants is what lays the foundation for a company's long-term success. The challenge facing any company is thus to achieve the highest possible level of customer satisfaction. The significance of the satisfaction rating is that ``. . . customer satisfaction measures are an indicator of future profit . . .'' (Hauser et al., 1994, p. 330). Customers who are satisfied with a purchased product will buy the same product again, more often (Reichheld, 1996), and will also recommend it to others (Oliver and Swan, 1989). The costs of doing business with a buyer with whom a relationship has already
been built up are moreover significantly lower than those entailed by canvassing a new customer (Fornell, 1992; Anderson et al., 1994).


The fact that the price is neglected when analyzing customer satisfaction is astonishing if we consider that price competition rules the market conditions in many branches and sectors, and that cost-effectiveness is one of the criteria that customers rank as particularly important when selecting a product or service. According to the dominant view, attention should be given to a useful performance concept and subsequent recording of customer satisfaction while the price is not considered as a determining factor. Many companies apparently are paying too much attention to the efficiency dimension and neglect the price dimension when thinking about cost efficiency.

The goal of this current study is to extend previous research in two important ways. It attempts to demonstrate the relationship between customer satisfaction Price neglected and price acceptance, and to analyze the implications that result for marketing policy. Particular emphasis is placed on the question of the extent to which an increase in satisfaction with a consumed commodity influences price acceptance by the consumer. Note that while the relationship between pricing policies and satisfaction evaluations seems to be a highly relevant topic, the satisfaction literature offers little insight to explain the relationship (Voss et al., 1998) and there are only a few studies that integrate the price explicitly as a component in the model (Lemmink et al., 1998). Especially, price acceptance has not received the degree of attention paid to other consequences of satisfaction, such as loyalty. Furthermore we close a gap, Voss et al. noticed, when they say ``. . . another shortfall in the extant satisfaction research is that only a small proportion of it focuses on services'' (1998, p. 46). They claim, that this is a major deficiency because the paucity of search qualities associated with services is likely to produce greater performance uncertainty and, thus, decreased accuracy in consumers' predictive expectations. When faced with performance uncertainty, consumers are likely to use heuristics, like the use of price as a cue in forming performance expectations (Rao and Monroe, 1989). As such, the influence of satisfaction on the price formation in service contexts is especially worthy of investigation. The following approach is adopted: First of all, the various methods used to measure customer satisfaction ratings and price acceptance are outlined. Next, hypotheses are derived for describing the relationship between satisfaction and price acceptance. The formulated hypotheses are then verified by means of an empirical study. Finally, the implications of the study's findings for research into purchasing patterns and
pricing policy are discussed.

Customer satisfaction and price acceptance
Measuring customer satisfaction In view of the considerable relevance of customer satisfaction for the success of a company, it comes as no surprise to find that a large number of marketing studies are devoted to measuring customers' perception of the fitness of company performances (Day and Perkins, 1992; Yi, 1990). The scope of these studies ranges from simple mean-value calculations and variance analyses to complex causal models based on the notion that customer satisfaction must always be interpreted as a multidimensional phenomenon, linked upstream and downstream to hypothetical constructs, such as the perceived quality of a service and customer retention.

However, before we can attempt to discuss measuring of customer satisfaction, it is vital that we define the concept of satisfaction. According to Anderson (1994), a satisfaction rating can be described as a decision regarding the fitness of a chosen product for its intended purpose. He postulates that ``. . . consumer satisfaction is generally construed to be a postconsumption evaluation dependent on perceived quality or value, expectations, and confirmation/disconfirmation ± degree (if any) of discrepancy between actual and expected quality . . .'' (Anderson, 1994, p. 20). It thus follows that (dis)satisfaction is the result of a complex information-processing process, which essentially consists of a desired/ actual comparison of a consumer's perception of a product or service (actual)and his expectations with regard to its fitness for its intended purpose(desired). The congruence or divergence yielded by this comparison between the perceived product quality and the anticipated quality is expressed as(dis)confirmation. Since this construct is directly linked to the target, disconfirmation leads to dissatisfaction (Oliver and DeSarbo, 1988). If we accept this view, satisfaction can be interpreted as the result of a comparative process, in which the ``desired'' component serves as a measure for evaluating perceptions of a given relationship between (dis)confirmation and(dis)satisfaction with a particular performance. It can thus be seen that, in the event of his expectations being disconfirmed, a customer's dissatisfaction is considerably greater than his satisfaction, should the anticipated product quality be confirmed to exactly the same degree.

The conjoint measurement as an instrument for measuring price acceptance Measurements of consumer price acceptance represent a direct attempt to establish the potential buyers' willingness to purchase as a function of various prices (Monroe, 1990). The level of acceptance can thus be defined as the maximum price which a buyer is prepared to pay for the product (Monroe, 1990). Several different methods are suitable for determining the price that the consumer subjectively presumes to be appropriate ± observations of the market, experimentation with prices and surveys (either direct or indirect) of experts' or customers' opinions (Monroe, 1990).

Methodological and practical problems render the first two approaches ± namely market observations and price experiments ± unsuitable as means of obtaining valid, reliable information that is relevant to the issue at hand. Since, in a real purchase or consumption situation, a buyer does not decide merely on the basis of a single criterion (e.g. price), but generally also considers up several different performance levels in a complex informationprocessing process, the traditional, direct form of survey can also be ruled out for the purposes of measuring price acceptance.

The conjoint measurement approach (Green and Srinivasan, 1990), on the other hand, appears well qualified for determining the price acceptance of potential buyers, as it takes account of the above-mentioned problem. The respondents do not rate individual product attributes in isolation, but rather jointly as an attribute bundle. This indirect method of investigation enables the influence of the individual levels of several different attributes on the order of preference for a set of surveyed objects to be measured simultaneously. The overall utility of a stimulus is made up of the sum of the partial utility values that are attached by a respondent to the individual product attributes. The conjoint measurement, as a decompositional approach, thus allows the individual partial utility values of the product attributes to be derived from empirically-obtained global judgements. Consumer price acceptance can be represented by means of the individual utility profiles (Kohli and Mahajan, 1991).

Hypotheses
One of the frequently named consequences of satisfaction is the increase of price sensitivity (Fornell et al., 1996; Fornell 1992). This is based on the fact that companies with higher satisfaction values are able to receive higher prices from customers. Price acceptance is closely related to the economic concept of consumer surplus: ``. . . the excess of the price which a man would be willing to pay rather than go without having a thing over what he actually does pay is the economic measure of his satisfaction surplus'' (Marshall, 1980, p. 260). Thus we expect customers who are satisfied with a product or a service to accept a higher price. According to Anderson (1996), the following hypothesis can be formulated:

H1: The greater a customer's satisfaction, the greater his price acceptance.

An increase in customer satisfaction is accompanied by an increase in price acceptance. The more satisfied a buyer is with a product or service, the more he or she is willing to pay. Furthermore, it is interesting to find out, if the relationship between the two constructs is monotonic linear or S-shaped. The second possibility can be explained by Assimilation Contrast Theory (Sherif and Hovland, 1961). Transferred to our problem this means, that within a range of acceptance a change on the scale of satisfaction affects the willingness to pay only to a small degree (Kalwani and Yim, 1992). In contrast, the values which are outside the acceptable range show a much higher slope of customer satisfaction. Figure 1 illustrates the modification of the linear relationship. Further hypotheses can be formulated:

H2: If the value of customer satisfaction is low, an increase of satisfaction produces a very large increase in price acceptance.

H3: If the satisfaction values are in a middle range, an increase of satisfaction only produces a small increase in the willingness to pay.

H4: And finally, if the value of customer satisfaction is high, an increase of satisfaction produces a very large increase in price acceptance.

It would seem advisable to analyze the relationship between satisfaction and price acceptance with a linear or piecewise linear regression, respectively.