Discount display in tiered pricing: Nudging subscriptions in online healthcare services

Discounts are increasingly embedded within tiered pricing to encourage larger purchases or longer service commitments. However, such discounts are often implicit and embedded across the price options, heightening consumers’ cognitive burden of cross-tier comparisons. How platforms display these discounts and whether salient discount display in tiered pricing can drive consumer demand remain largely unclear. Drawing on nudge theory, we conceptualize discount display as a digital salience nudge and examine its effect on consumer subscription demand in online healthcare settings. We leverage a quasi-natural experiment on a leading Chinese online healthcare platform, which redesigned its subscription interface to render implicit savings across tiers salient to patients. Using an intensity-based difference-in-differences approach, we find that discount display significantly increases patient subscriptions. Further analyses suggest that this effect is unlikely to stem from physician-side price reductions or concurrent platform-side changes and is instead consistent with the informational effect of discount display. Moderation results further show that the promotional effect of discount display strengthens for physicians treating a higher share of chronic conditions and becomes statistically insignificant in predominantly episodic care. This study contributes to discount promotion literature by offering robust empirical evidence on the positive effect of salient discount display in tiered pricing contexts and provides managerial implications for interface design and promotion management in digital retailing markets.