It seems to reinforce a trend I've noticed in menu design. Where prices used to be “$24.95,” now I see “25.” Nice too see that designers have diners all figured out!

Just looking over the original report.

After a very brief review:

From the sumbision guidelines page on their site:

"Submissions are read for general acceptability by the academic director of the Center for Hospitality Research and then sent in blind form to industry and academic reviewers."

Not sure if this makes it officially "peer reviewed" but at least it's more than self published. If we check out who's on the Advisory Board we see "Steve Russell, Chief People Officer, Senior VP, Human Resources, McDonald’s USA."

If we check out the Senior Partners, we see "McDonald’s USA" is third on the list.

The second authour, Kimes, who is most likely Yang's supervisor, has an impressive background. Note that Walt Disney World Resorts was a previous client of hers.

The three different menus (numbers with a $, numbers without, and numbers written in words) differed slightly in their design. Each used a different colour elastic binding so that the server could tell which was which. A possible confound. Overall, this looks like a pretty tight study. Well written, and seemly good stats, but I'm not that good at math (yet). Judging by the graphic design of the publication, someone has obviously spend a lot of time on it and are attempting appealing to corporate culture as well as academia.

Thanks for the link Sii. Research is fun!