Empathic cultural consumers: Pay what you want in the theater

Pay what you want (PWYW) is an increasingly popular sales strategy in which consumers voluntarily decide how much to pay for a product or service. PWYW has often been described as an exercise in the “empathy economy,” where consumers' payment choices might be seen as empowered expressions of their tastes and preferences, and sellers have a stronger incentive for empathizing with them. Beyond their economic interest, PWYW experiences also deserve significant attention in the social sciences given that they challenge several key assumptions of rational choice and neoclassical economic theory, as well as conventional consumer behavior and pricing theories. This paper analyzes three plays performed at the Beckett Theater in Barcelona using PWYW with very profitable outcomes. Our analysis shows that socio-psychological factors, such as payments attributed to others and satisfaction with the play, are the best predictors of customer payments.