IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/52766.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Pay What You Want – But Pay Enough! Information Asymmetries and PWYW Pricing

Author

Listed:
  • Greiff, Matthias
  • Egbert, Henrik
  • Xhangolli, Kreshnik

Abstract

Pay What You Want (PWYW) pricing has received considerable attention recently. Empirical studies show that when PWYW pricing is implemented buyers do not behave selfishly in a number of cases and that some sellers are able to use PWYW to increase turnover as well as profits. In this paper we present a theoretical model of buyer behavior under asymmetric information about production costs. Our model shows that information asymmetries provide an explanation for the results found in empirical studies.

Suggested Citation

  • Greiff, Matthias & Egbert, Henrik & Xhangolli, Kreshnik, 2013. "Pay What You Want – But Pay Enough! Information Asymmetries and PWYW Pricing," MPRA Paper 52766, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:52766
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/52766/1/MPRA_paper_52358.pdf
    File Function: original version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Simon G�chter & Arno Riedl, "undated". "Moral Property Rights in Bargaining," IEW - Working Papers 113, Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - University of Zurich.
    2. Regner, Tobias & Barria, Javier A., 2009. "Do consumers pay voluntarily? The case of online music," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 71(2), pages 395-406, August.
    3. Kim Ju-Young & Natter Martin & Spann Martin, 2010. "Kish: Where Customers Pay As They Wish," Review of Marketing Science, De Gruyter, vol. 8(2), pages 1-14, July.
    4. Capra, C. Monica & Lanier, Kelli F. & Meer, Shireen, 2010. "The effects of induced mood on bidding in random nth-price auctions," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 75(2), pages 223-234, August.
    5. Kahneman, Daniel & Knetsch, Jack L & Thaler, Richard, 1986. "Fairness as a Constraint on Profit Seeking: Entitlements in the Market," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 76(4), pages 728-741, September.
    6. Riener, Gerhard & Traxler, Christian, 2012. "Norms, moods, and free lunch: Longitudinal evidence on payments from a Pay-What-You-Want restaurant," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 41(4), pages 476-483.
    7. Weng Marc LIM & Ding Hooi TING & Wei Yi WONG & Pei Theng KHOO, 2012. "Apparel acquisition: why more is less?," Management & Marketing, Economic Publishing House, vol. 7(3), Autumn.
    8. Klaus M. Schmidt & Martin Spann & Robert Zeithammer, 2015. "Pay What You Want as a Marketing Strategy in Monopolistic and Competitive Markets," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 61(6), pages 1217-1236, June.
    9. Steve Buchheit & Nick Feltovich, 2011. "Experimental Evidence Of A Sunk‐Cost Paradox: A Study Of Pricing Behavior In Bertrand–Edgeworth Duopoly," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 52(2), pages 317-347, May.
    10. Simon Gächter & Arno Riedl, 2005. "Moral Property Rights in Bargaining with Infeasible Claims," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 51(2), pages 249-263, February.
    11. Regner, Tobias, 2015. "Why consumers pay voluntarily: Evidence from online music," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 57(C), pages 205-214.
    12. Nick Feltovich, 2011. "The Effect of Subtracting a Constant from all Payoffs in a Hawk-Dove Game: Experimental Evidence of Loss Aversion in Strategic Behavior," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 77(4), pages 814-826, April.
    13. Nick Feltovich, 2011. "The Effect of Subtracting a Constant from all Payoffs in a Hawk‐Dove Game: Experimental Evidence of Loss Aversion in Strategic Behavior," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 77(4), pages 814-826, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Batt, Verena & Holzer, Matthias & Farouq, Jasmin & Bruhn, Manfred, 2018. "Pay What You Want: Eine empirische Untersuchung zur Wirkung des Pricing-Instruments auf Nachfrager," Marketing Review St.Gallen, Universität St.Gallen, Institut für Marketing und Customer Insight, vol. 35(2), pages 96-101.
    2. Greiff, Matthias & Egbert, Henrik, 2016. "A Survey of the Empirical Evidence on PWYW Pricing," MPRA Paper 68693, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Samahita Margaret, 2020. "Pay-What-You-Want in Competition," The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 20(1), pages 1-16, January.
    4. Gerpott Torsten J., 2016. "A review of the empirical literature on Pay-What-You-Want price setting," Management & Marketing, Sciendo, vol. 11(4), pages 566-596, December.
    5. Stangl, Brigitte & Kastner, Margit & Prayag, Girish, 2017. "Pay-what-you-want for high-value priced services: Differences between potential, new, and repeat customers," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 74(C), pages 168-174.
    6. Elisa Hofmann & Deliah Bolesta & Aya Adra, 2023. "Immorality Judgments and Framing Effects in Voluntary Payment Settings," Jena Economics Research Papers 2023-010, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Saccardo, Silvia & Li, Charis X. & Samek, Anya & Gneezy, Ayelet, 2021. "Nudging generosity in consumer elective pricing," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 163(C), pages 91-104.
    2. Samahita Margaret, 2020. "Pay-What-You-Want in Competition," The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 20(1), pages 1-16, January.
    3. Mak, Vincent & Zwick, Rami & Rao, Akshay R. & Pattaratanakun, Jake A., 2015. "“Pay what you want” as threshold public good provision," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 127(C), pages 30-43.
    4. Gerpott Torsten J., 2016. "A review of the empirical literature on Pay-What-You-Want price setting," Management & Marketing, Sciendo, vol. 11(4), pages 566-596, December.
    5. Ranjit M. Christopher & Fernando S. Machado, 2019. "Consumer response to design variations in pay-what-you-want pricing," Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Springer, vol. 47(5), pages 879-898, September.
    6. Gerpott, Torsten J. & Schneider, Christina, 2016. "Buying behaviors when similar products are available under pay-what-you-want and posted price conditions: Field-experimental evidence," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 65(C), pages 135-145.
    7. Hofmann, Elisa & Fiagbenu, Michael E. & Özgümüs, Asri & Tahamtan, Amir M. & Regner, Tobias, 2021. "Who is watching me? Disentangling audience and interpersonal closeness effects in a Pay-What-You-Want context," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 90(C).
    8. Jin Young Chung, 2017. "Price fairness and PWYW (pay what you want): a behavioral economics perspective," Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 16(1), pages 40-55, February.
    9. Egbert, Henrik & Greiff, Matthias & Xhangolli, Kreshnik, 2014. "PWYW Pricing ex post Consumption: A Sales Strategy for Experience Goods," MPRA Paper 53376, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    10. Tobias Regner & Gerhard Riener, 2017. "Privacy Is Precious: On the Attempt to Lift Anonymity on the Internet to Increase Revenue," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 26(2), pages 318-336, June.
    11. Schröder, Marina & Lüer, Annemarie & Sadrieh, Abdolkarim, 2015. "Pay-what-you-want or mark-off-your-own-price – A framing effect in customer-selected pricing," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 57(C), pages 200-204.
    12. Kim, Ju-Young & Natter, Martin & Spann, Martin, 2014. "Sampling, discounts or pay-what-you-want: Two field experiments," International Journal of Research in Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 31(3), pages 327-334.
    13. Sana El Harbi & Gilles Grolleau & Insaf Bekir, 2014. "Substituting piracy with a pay-what-you-want option: does it make sense?," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 37(2), pages 277-297, April.
    14. Reisman, Richard & Payne, Adrian & Frow, Pennie, 2019. "Pricing in consumer digital markets: A dynamic framework," Australasian marketing journal, Elsevier, vol. 27(3), pages 139-148.
    15. Christoph Feldhaus & Tassilo Sobotta & Peter Werner, 2019. "Norm Uncertainty and Voluntary Payments in the Field," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 65(4), pages 1855-1866, April.
    16. Gravert, Christina, 2017. "Pride and patronage - pay-what-you-want pricing at a charitable bookstore," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 67(C), pages 1-7.
    17. Greiff, Matthias & Egbert, Henrik, 2016. "A Survey of the Empirical Evidence on PWYW Pricing," MPRA Paper 68693, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    18. Klaus M. Schmidt & Martin Spann & Robert Zeithammer, 2015. "Pay What You Want as a Marketing Strategy in Monopolistic and Competitive Markets," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 61(6), pages 1217-1236, June.
    19. Krämer, Florentin & Schmidt, Klaus M. & Spann, Martin & Stich, Lucas, 2017. "Delegating pricing power to customers: Pay What You Want or Name Your Own Price?," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 136(C), pages 125-140.
    20. Regner, Tobias & Riener, Gerhard, 2012. "Voluntary payments, privacy and social pressure on the internet: A natural field experiment," DICE Discussion Papers 82, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    PWYW pricing; information asymmetry; fairness; buyer behavior;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D4 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design
    • M2 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Business Economics
    • M3 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Marketing and Advertising

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:52766. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Joachim Winter (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.