*2.1. Hypotheses Development*

To investigate variances between price conscious consumers' and non-price conscious consumers' visual attention to product attributes and their subsequent purchase likelihood, four hypotheses were developed and tested in this study. First, since consumers are more visually attentive to subjectively more important attributes [2,29], we hypothesize that price conscious consumers will fixate more on price than non-price attributes (H1a). Price consciousness, by definition, is exclusively concerned with consumers' focus on searching for and paying a low price [1,5,32], thus, we hypothesize that price conscious consumers will fixate more on price than non-price conscious consumers (H1b). Price theory

suggests that price serves as an indicator of the monetary sacrifice for a specific product. The higher the price of a product, *ceteris paribus*, the less likely a consumer will be to purchase the product. In addition, as ornamental plants (which were used in the eye tracking experiments) are often perceived as luxury products as opposed to necessity goods [33], we further hypothesize that there will be a negative relationship between purchase likelihood and price conscious consumers (H2a) and that there will be a negative relationship between purchase likelihood and visual attention to price (H2b). Lastly, price conscious consumers' visual attention to price signs will inversely affect their purchase likelihood (H3).

#### *2.2. Recruitment and Sampling*

Ninety-five participants were recruited in central Florida through flyers at garden centers, an emailing list, and Facebook advertisements. Participants were prescreened when they signed up for the experiment to ensure that they had purchased ornamental plants in the past 12 months. In-person participation was required to facilitate the use of the eye tracking technology (participants received a compensation of \$30 for their time and collaboration at the end of the survey). A sample size of 95 was deemed acceptable since previous studies using eye tracking metrics used far fewer subjects [19,22,34]. Participants were screened to insure they were active purchasers of the study product (ornamental plants). Participants' average age was 53 years with the majority (66%) being over 50 years old (Table 1). Thirty-nine percent were males and 55.6% earned more than \$50,000 at the time of the study. The average household size consisted of approximately two people. Compared to Florida census data, the sample is slightly biased towards females at 61% [35]. However, the sample was considered acceptable since the socio-demographic results are consistent with previous studies in horticulture [2] and representative of the core consumers of ornamental plants [36].


**Table 1.** Socio-demographic characteristics of the sample participants (*n* = 96).

Notes: Standard deviation is reported in parenthesis. <sup>a</sup> *p*-value reports the statistical significance of the difference between price conscious consumers and non-price conscious consumers based on paired *t*-test statistic.
