Psychological pricing: reducing theft? [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
The origin of “99 cents”

On Wikipedia, the article for psychological pricing (ending prices in -99 or similar) gives the following suggestion for why it is done, as opposed to the psychological aspect behind it.

Others have suggested that fractional pricing was first adopted as a control on employee theft. For cash transactions with a round price, there is a chance that a dishonest cashier will pocket the bill rather than record the sale. For cash transactions with an odd price, the cashier must make change for the customer. This generally means opening the cash register which creates a record of the sale in the register and reduces the risk of the cashier stealing from the store owner.

This is not cited or sourced, so I wonder if any studies have been performed on this? Is it actually harder to steal from the store with odd prices?

Answer 1

In Psychological Pricing: Private vs. Professional Vendors

While it has been argued that psychological pricing was originally introduced as an aid to prevent theft by employees (Gendall et al., 1996), it is nowadays common belief that psychological prices boost sales

You can find the quoted paper behind paywalls here:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=1185497659407632930&hl=de&as_sdt=0,5

In PRICE POINTS AND PRICE RIGIDITY ON THE INTERNET: A MASSIVE QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL DATA MINING APPROACH

Historically, odd pricing was developed to control employee theft from cash registers, by requiring change to be given to the customer so the sale was recorded.

In $9.99: CAN "JUST-BELOW" PRICING BE RECONCILED WITH REALITY

The cash register made it easier for store owners to prevent employee theft since it kept a record of each transaction rung up by the employee. However, the employee could still pocket the money and not ring up the sale.