GMAT Critical Reasoning (CR) | Re: Consumer's overall perception

Consumer's overall perception of the value of a purchase is based not just on assessing the product's inherent value (the acquisition value) but also in part on assessing the value of the "deal", i.e., the transaction value. To assess the transaction value, buyers tend to compare the sales price with another price, the "reference price", that they take to represent the product's real value - another advertised price for the same product or the price of a competing product.