When the placebo response was invoked by Beecher (1946, 1955) in soldiers who were wounded on the beaches of Anzio (it was noted that wounded soldiers required less morphine than wounded civilians), it unleashed a revolution in the understanding of the underlying neurobiology of the placebo effect and the impact of placebo in human clinical studies. Although placebo is a widespread phenomenon in medicine, the underlying neurobiology of it is not yet fully elucidated, though pain and analgesia have provided the most compelling and mechanistic insights into the phenomenon

This article presents a study on the influence of nonconsciousness expectations about the relationship between price and quality on consumers in a placebo-like manner. Even when the price paid for a good has no relationship to its quality, consumers' nonconscious beliefs about the price-quality relationship change their experience with the good. In marketing, a placebo might be a brand that claims to have properties that it does not actually possess and, through such claims, changes the consumer's behavior. In the study, the importance of motivation is reported as a driver of marketing placebo effects

The authors present a new model that links the well-known RFM (recency, frequency, and monetary value) paradigm with customer lifetime value (CLV). Although previous researchers have made a conceptual link, none has presented a formal model with a well-grounded behavioral “story.” Key to this analysis is the notion of “iso-value” curves, which enable the grouping of individual customers who have different purchasing histories but similar future valuations. Iso-value curves make it easy to visualize the interactions and trade-offs among the RFM measures and CLV. The stochastic model is based on the Pareto/NBD framework to capture the flow of transactions over time and a gamma-gamma submodel for spend per transaction