**1. Introduction**

Price strongly affects consumers' purchasing decisions. Consumers who are unwilling/unable to pay a higher price or primarily focus on a product's price during the decision making process have been called 'price conscious', 'price sensitive', 'value conscious', 'value oriented', 'price oriented', 'deal prone', 'thrifty', and so on [1–7]. Here, we refer to those individuals as 'price conscious'. Consumers' level of price consciousness greatly influences their decision making processes and purchasing behaviors [8–10].

Prior research primarily focuses on defining price consciousness [7,8,10,11] and identifying key factors that influence these consumers' shopping behavior [1,5,6]. Price conscious consumers place greater emphasis on a product's price and carefully weigh the potential benefits of the purchase against the cost of the good [2,12]. Additionally, price conscious consumers exhibit similar demographic characteristics. They tend to be deal prone [13], and many factors (including income, product involvement, product quality perceptions, upbringing, age, socialization, and cognitive beliefs on saving money) have been shown to influence consumers' level of price consciousness [11,14,15]. Price consciousness has long been studied, but, to the authors' knowledge, visual attention metrics have not been used to assess this decision making style.

Understanding visual attention and its role in decision making is important since industry stakeholders spend a substantial amount of money on in-store promotions (e.g., in 1997, the food industry spent \$48.7 billion on in-store promotions [16]), but only 2% of the visual field is processed

and used in decision making [17,18]. Visual attention metrics have recently been incorporated into consumer behavior research to investigate choice [17,19], examine decision making processes [20,21], and improve the econometric model fit [17,22,23]. Past studies also use eye tracking to study promotional aspects related to packaging design, nutritional information usage, and shelving strategies to optimize product design and in-store visibility [24]. However, little is known about the use of this technology to investigate price conscious consumers' visual attention to prices and purchase likelihood within the retail setting.

To price conscious consumers, the product's price is a key determinant of their purchase intentions. This raises several questions that invite closer examination. Do price conscious consumers' visual attention to in-store promotions and prices vary from non-price conscious consumers? Are price conscious consumers more or less attentive to the price attribute than non-price product attributes? How does this visual attention influence price conscious consumers' purchasing decisions? Understanding the relationship between price consciousness, visual attention, and purchasing behavior could lead to more effective price communications and in-store promotions, especially in retail outlets that target price conscious consumers (e.g., stores using everyday low price [EDLP] pricing strategies). In this manuscript, we address these questions by investigating the relationship between consumers' price consciousness and visual attention to in-store price and non-price attribute signs on ornamental plants using a conjoint analysis paired with an eye tracking experiment.

Economic theory states there is a negative relationship between higher prices and purchase likelihood. Price is an important attribute in consumers' decision making processes which can encourage [25] or discourage consumption [26,27]. Furthermore, price becomes consumers' primary information cue when information overload occurs [28].

Existing visual attention research provides mixed results on the relationship between visual attention and price attributes. On the one hand, Chen et al. [29] suggest that participants who spend more time focusing on prices are, typically, more sensitive to price. Similarly, Van Loo et al. [23] show participants' utility decreases as visual attendance to the price attribute increases and more visual attention to price indicates higher price sensitivity. Based on their estimations, each fixation on price decreases willingness to pay (WTP) by 2.3%, while each second fixation on price decreases WTP by 10.1%. On the other hand, Behe et al. [30] suggest that low involvement consumers are likely more price sensitive and, thus, look at price quicker than highly involved consumers. Huddleston et al. [31] find price information holds more visual attention (as indicated by a greater number of fixations) and that there is a positive relationship between visual attention to price and likelihood to buy.

Surprisingly, little is known about how visual attention to price impacts price conscious consumers' purchasing behavior in general. An actual price-conscious measurement has yet to be incorporated into these experiments. Studies that address the relationship between price conscious consumers' visual attention to price information and their purchasing decisions are limited and tend to be auxiliary to the primary focus of the research. For instance, Behe et al. [2] used a cluster analysis and found 16% of their sample was price-oriented and spent more time (in seconds) visually attending price-related horticultural retail displays.
