On The Reference Point Effect of Reserve and Buy It Now Prices

In recent years, a trend in retail pricing has been to give consumers greater autonomy in setting their own prices, be it through auctions or other forms of participative pricing. Such consumer pricing autonomy often requires the seller to set limits in the form of price floors and price ceilings. Price floors and ceilings in our auction settings are referred to as reserve prices (RP) and Buy It Now (BIN) prices, respectively. We examine the effect of RP and BIN presence and magnitude on the number of bidders and ending price. Using auctions, we uncover consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) through bids. WTP is malleable through reference cues. Our focus is on two such cues: BINs and RPs. Results of two field studies, augmented with a laboratory study, show that both BINs and RPs result in lower bidder entry, but have an overall positive effect on ending price. Furthermore, results show that RP is more effective than a comparable BIN magnitude and that these two pricing cues are substitutes. The study design allows the authors to rule out alternative explanations. Open RP and BIN's effect on ending price is due to a reference point effect rather than a price truncation effect. Thus, retailers can increase WTP through changing these reference cues and exploit a richer choice set over which to shape a malleable WTP. The quantification of the interaction between RP and BIN gives managers the ability to jointly take advantage of both RP and BIN.     

When auction meets fixed price: a theoretical and empirical examination of buy-it-now auctions

Recently fixed pricing and auctions have been brought together in a new pricing format that offers bidders the option of prematurely ending an auction at a fixed price. The growing popularity of auctions presents an interesting pricing decision for managers: whether to sell at a fixed price, in a regular auction, or through a buy-it-now auction. This paper studies eBay’s buy-it-now auction and answers the following research questions: why is fixed price used at traditional auctions, will buy-it-now increase the seller’s profit, how is an optimal price determined, and how is the buy-it-now decision influenced by key factors such as the customer’s cost of participating in the auction, the seller’s reserve price, and the number of potential customers. Our results show that when customers make endogenous participation decisions according to their participation costs, buy-it-now auctions can increase both customers’ utility and sellers’ profit. Endogenous participation has important implications for seller’s pricing decisions such as price formats and levels. Depending on the level of the posted price, the resulting price format could be either fixed price, buy-it-now auction or pure auction. Therefore, the seller needs to be careful and take into account market conditions when posting a price at auctions. We empirically test the model assumptions and predictions using data collected from eBay.

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Mixed pricing in online marketplaces

A rich theory literature predicts mixed strategies in posted prices due to standard price discrimination, search frictions, and various other rationales. While typically interpreted as implying occasional sales or price dispersion, online marketplaces enable a firm to truly use randomization as a tool in pricing, and so such behavior should be expected to arise in online settings. We investigate a case of mixed pricing across a large subset of products on a major e-commerce website. We first test for randomizing behavior, and then construct a model of price discrimination that would generate randomization as optimal behavior. We estimate the model and use it to assess pricing effects of a proposed merger in the industry.     

Viability and Equilibrium in Securities Markets with Frictions

In this paper we study some foundational issues in the theory of asset pricing with market frictions. We model market frictions by letting the set of marketed contingent claims (the opportunity set) be a convex set, and the pricing rule at which these claims are available be convex. This is the reduced form of multiperiod securities price models incorporating a large class of market frictions. It is said to be viable as a model of economic equilibrium if there exist price-taking maximizing agents who are happy with their initial endowment, given the opportunity set, and hence for whom supply equals demand. This is equivalent to the existence of a positive lineaar pricing rule on the entirespace of contingent claims—an underlying frictionless linear pricing rule—that lies below the convex pricing rule on the set of marketed claims. This is also equivalent to the absence of asymptotic free lunches—a generalization of opportunities of arbitrage. When a market for a nonmarketed contingent claim opens, a bid-ask price pair for this claim is said to be consistent if it is a bid-ask price pair in at least a viable economy with this extended opportunity set. If the set of marketed contingent claims is a convex cone and the pricing rule is convex and sublinear, we show that the set of consistent prices of a claim is a closed interval and is equal (up to its boundary) to the set of its prices for all the underlying frictionless pricing rules. We also show that there exists a unique extended consistent sublinear pricing rule—the supremum of the underlying frictionless linear pricing rules—for which the original equilibrium does not collapse when a new market opens, regardless of preferences and endowments. If the opportunity set is the reduced form of a multiperiod securities market model, we study the closedness of the interval of prices of a contingent claim for the underlying frictionless pricing rules.     

Whether and to What Extent Consumers Demand Fair Pricing Behavior for Its Own Sake

This article contributes to scholarly understanding of the significance of procedural fairness in pricing contexts. It has been widely recognized that price fairness judgments concern both the outcome (fair price) and the procedure leading to the outcome (fair pricing). However, extant research has traditionally viewed procedural fairness as a means to outcome fairness. According to this instrumental view, procedural fairness is a component or antecedent of outcome fairness, but has no direct effects on consumers’ responses to prices. Building on the relational perspective on fairness, we develop and test a model of price procedural fairness as an end in itself. In three lab studies, we show that (1) when information regarding outcome (an unfavorable price difference) and procedure (the pricing practice underlying the price difference) is available simultaneously and unambiguously, procedural fairness has direct and stronger effects than outcome fairness on consumers’ responses and (2) procedural fairness mediates the effects of pricing practices on these responses. In all three studies, adding procedural fairness as a direct predictor of consumers’ responses increases the explanatory power of a model of price fairness significantly. Our model can explain peculiar real-world cases in which consumers reacted very strongly over relatively small price differences. The research findings point to the significance of the non-instrumental aspect of consumer’s demand for ethical (fair pricing) behavior and the need for companies to assess the fairness of their pricing practices from the consumer perspective.     

Is transparency a good thing? How online price transparency and variability can benefit firms and influence consumer decision making

The internet has empowered consumers and changed the way they search and shop for products and services by increasing the availability and transparency of pricing and other comparative information. However, what is less clear from a managerial perspective is just how transparent pricing information should be. While it might seem that increasing price transparency would reduce consumer search, we find that it may actually increase search and delay. In this article, we review the use of firms’ application of price transparency in practice and propose that specific types of information can influence how transparent prices are to consumers, and how such transparency can influence consumer decisions in a way that is beneficial for the firm. We focus on a specific form of transparency: whether or not the consumer knows the range of pricing. We also discuss whether a high variability pricing approach versus a low variability pricing approach influences consumer decision making—and whether this influence is moderated by transparency.     

Pricing and Cost Recovery for Internet Services: Practical Review,Classification, and Application of Relevant Models

Suitable pricing models for Internet services represent one of the main prerequisites for a successfully running implementation of a charging and accounting system. This paper introduces general aspects influencing the choice of a pricing model in practical situations and presents a survey as well as a classification of relevant and advanced approaches to be found in the scientific literature. First performance results on charging extensions within the Internet are presented, which are completed by a set of market price simulations for dynamic pricing models within the same implementation environment. Based on cost model investigations some detailed insights into price and cost issues from an Internet Service Provider's (ISP) point of view are given. Moreover, current challenges as well as problems are discussed in a practical context as investigated in the Swiss National Science Foundation project Charging and Accounting Technology for the Internet (CATI).     

Intimacy,rites of passage and social support: symbolic meaning from lifetime shopping experiences

In this study expectations and prediction errors are introduced in the context of retail price setting. A new model and a new data set are used to examine whether prediction errors influence retail price setting, whether prediction errors cause only limited price changes to maintain price stability and whether there are differences in influences according to whether prediction errors are positive or negative. The model is an extended version of a full costs pricing model and the averaged data are for a large number of shop types in German retailing for a long series of successive years.     

Healthy Food: Determinants of Price Knowledge of Functional Dairy Products

Agri-food business pricing practices assume that consumers know about prices and that price is an impediment to healthy food purchase and consumption. The present article assesses functional dairy food shoppers’ price knowledge accuracy and its determinants. The data were gathered from 207 face-to-face interviews with shoppers at the point of sale and were analyzed with binary logistic regression testing a number of set hypotheses. Results show that healthy food price knowledge is higher than for conventional food but still low, and consumers tend to underestimate the price paid. Price knowledge accuracy increases with high purchase frequency, promotional products, hedonistic consumption, and for enhanced function products. Results provide a basis for higher sustainable pricing strategies. Consumers’ inability to distinguish misleading pricing strategies calls for regulators to ensure fair and ethical market practices, especially for healthy food.     

Optimal criteria for selecting price discrimination metrics when buyers have log-normally distributed willingness-to-pay

This paper investigates how a monopoly seller should determine the optimal set of pricing variables (pricing metrics) for third-degree price discrimination applications in which buyers have log-normally distributed willingness-to-pay (WTP). In a setup that closely resembles linear and probit regressions, this paper shows that when the monopoly seller is restricted to using one metric and no price discrimination cost exists, the pricing metric that best reduces the residual variance of buyers’ willingness-to-pay is the one that maximizes revenue. Equivalently, the explanatory power of willingness-to-pay is the ordering criterion. This paper also shows that this criterion is not universally true when willingness-to-pay follows other distributions. When the seller incurs price discrimination costs associated with different metrics, the ordering criterion becomes the explanatory power of each pricing metric divided by its cost. This paper also discusses how to apply this model to solve real-world pricing problems with contingent valuation models or using probit regression.

Uniform or spatially differentiated? Pricing Strategies for Information Goods under simultaneous and sequential decision-making in multi-market context

Product pricing has been one of the central issues in the field of marketing and consumer services for managers and researchers alike. However, pricing of information goods has not been paid much attention in literature. For information goods the marginal costs of production and transportation of information goods (online movies, video games, etc.) is almost zero. Hence, the pricing decisions need to be thought of purely in competitive profit maximizing terms. This paper proposes mechanisms for managers to evaluate and base their pricing decisions on rational frameworks that takes into account various situations when they enter a new market and when they are incumbent in a new market. This paper addresses the research gap of spatially differentiated pricing strategy for information goods that has not been studied in literature so far. We create stylized theoretical models under both, sequential and simultaneous decision-making conditions. We determine the equilibrium price and the equilibrium profit for the two firms for each of the four possible scenarios based on their pricing strategies. Our analysis reveals that the dominance of one pricing strategy over the other depends on product differentiation factor capturing joint effect of the product substitutability and consumer's price sensitivity under sequential decision making and the market size along with consumer's price sensitivity for simultaneous decision making. As an extension, we propose a generalized model demonstrating the uniform and spatially differentiated pricing strategies of the firms under simultaneous and sequential selection for multiple domestic and international markets.     

Hedging under the influence of transaction costs: An empirical investigation on FTSE 100 index options

The Black–Scholes (BS; F. Black & M. Scholes, 1973) option pricing model, and modern parametric option pricing models in general, assume that a single unique price for the underlying instrument exists, and that it is the mid‐ (the average of the ask and the bid) price. In this article the authors consider the Financial Times and London Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 Index Options for the time period 1992–1997. They estimate the ask and bid prices for the index, and show that, when substituted for the mid‐price in the BS formula, they provide superior option price predictors, for call and put options, respectively. This result is reinforced further when they .t a non‐parametric neural network model to market prices of liquid options. The empirical .ndings in this article suggest that the ask and bid prices of the underlying asset provide a superior fit to the mid/closing price because they include market maker's, compensation for providing liquidity in the market for constituent stocks of the FTSE 100 index. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 27:471–494, 2007     

Überlegungen zur Bedeutung Unverbindlicher Preisempfehlungen und ihrer Kontrolle durch das Bundeskartellamt Ein Kommentar zu den Beiträgen von Reich und Schultes in ZVP, 1, 1977/3 bzw. 1977/4

Reflections on the importance of recommended prices and their control by the Cartel Office. A comment on the papers by Reich (JCP, 1, 1977/3) and Schultes (JCP, 1, 1977/4). The The comment deals with two previous articles on recommended prices. Both Reich and Schultes refer to the 1977 report of the German Federal Government on recommended prices, which was intended to show the consequences of price recommendations and to give a better base for further decisions of the legislative assembly. The two authors evaluate the information in this report very differently and draw opposite conclusions. Reich pleads in the interest of the consumer for an unlimited prohibition of the institute of recommended prices. His thesis is based on three arguments:

1. Article 38 a of the Law Against Restraints of Competition implies that manufacturers often find themselves in a dilemma. Either they respect the character of the price as recommended, not binding, whereby the often emerging wide retail price range activates the Cartel Office which calls for the abolition of the recommended price since it is “unrealistic”, or manufacturers require that the recommended price is adhered to, which leads to accusations of price fixing. In practice, therefore, the institute of recommended prices is on the decrease except in connection with selective distribution systems where it is used increasingly and functions as vertical price fixing.
2. Prices which are recommended and available to retailers only are devices for concerted vertical pricing and in reality work like price fixing.
3. An abolition of recommended prices would strengthen traders' and consumers' resistance to high prices.

Schultes, on the other hand, adopts the view that the present Law together with some minor improvements is sufficient to protect the consumer against misuses of recommended prices. His view is based on the argument that the control by the Cartel Office has been successful, considering the great number of eliminated price recommendations, and that in the case of an unlimited prohibition of recommended prices on would have to reckon with the development of uncontrollable surrogates. A critical examination of these arguments shows that neither position is well-founded. The theoretical considerations of both authors contain contradictions and are not based on empirical findings. Schultes' paper suggests that the control of recommended prices by the Cartel Office leads to a continuous decimation of recommended prices and therefore, in the long run, either to the same result as Reich's demand or to a treatment which discriminates against certain firms or trades. It is very doubtful if the development of surrogates is prevented through this control. The statement of Schultes that the Cartel Office's control activity has been sucessful up to now also seems very questionable, since the number of eliminated price recommendations is not sufficient proof; a more sophisticated cost-benefit analysis is called for. The analysis of Reich's arguments indicates the following:

1. It is quite correct that Article 38 a of the Law contains conflicting aims. This conflict arises from the choice of criteria for declaring recommendations unlawful. There are two possible solutions to the conflict: the total abolition of recommended prices or a change in the criteria for misuses of the institute. Reich favours the first solution without considering that the second possibility may perhaps offer a better solution. Further considerations show that the conflict arises above all from prohibiting actual prices from being much lower than recommended prices. This rule seems very questionable because it eliminates price competition. Furthermore it is very doubtful that consumers are really misled by a large difference between the recommended price and that charged.
2. Prices which are recommended to retailers only certainly work like vertical price fixing sometimes, but not always. Apart from this objection, the least plausible of Reich's theses is that a prohibition of recommended prices would eliminate concerted pricing behaviour. This would be true only if the recommendations were the main cause of such behaviour. This view must be questioned because the development and the practice of concerted pricing is linked with specific market structures which cannot be eliminated by the prohibition of recommended prices.
3. Therefore, by prohibiting recommended prices one cannot expect greater retailer resistance to high prices. In addition, there seems to be no chance to strengthen price resistance of consumers by an abolition of the institute. This would suppose a very intensive comparing of prices, which is not be expected in the case of low price products. On the other hand, the consumer will compare prices if he wants to buy a very expensive or long-lasting article. In this case recommended prices are very helpful, because they indicate the highest possible price of a product, and it facilitates price bargaining if the consumer knows both recommended and actual selling prices of several traders.

The author's discussion shows that the dispute about the importance of recommended prices suffers above all from not differentiating between products which are bought and consumed daily and durable goods. Furthermore, the previous articles are one-sided in that they concentrate almost entirely on prices. If one takes product quality into consideration as well, one will find that the present Law offers a good chance to ensure that products are supplied in a constant or improved quality. Recommended prices should therefore only be allowed if the manufacturer submits to recurrent quality controls of his products. The advantages of recommended prices pointed out in the article adhere only to price recommendations which are made known to all consumers; therefore, recommendations intended for retailers only should be prohibited.     

Value-based pricing in competitive situations with the help of multi-product price response maps

This article introduces multi-product price response maps for various value pricing applications in competitive situations. The maps are based on the direct elicitation of individual willingness to pay (WTP) as a range for competing products; they reveal an individual's or market's choice probability for a focal product, at its own and competing products' prices. Transforming the price response into profit, revenue, or unit sold maps supports optimal pricing decisions. The maps are also useful for optimizing profit differences from the closest competitor and for portfolio pricing. Managers can use a consumer indecisiveness map, gained from the WTP range data, to devise complementary marketing measures at prices where consumer uncertainty is high. The illustration of this approach uses two empirical examples, featuring two or more competing consumer goods, and demonstrates the predictive and external validity of these proposed maps.     

第三方物流服务的定价分析框架

第三方物流服务价格是第三方物流关系能否成功最重要影响因素之一。针对第三方物流服务定价实践和研究缺乏系统性这一特点,从产品角度介绍定价概念模型,将其扩展并形成第三方物流服务定价的概念模型,根据第三方物流服务交易过程及其特点,结合概念模型,提出第三方物流服务定价的分析框架,为第三方物流服务定价建模及决策提供了一种系统思维方式。     

VIX option pricing

Substantial progress has been made in developing more realistic option pricing models for S&P 500 index (SPX) options. Empirically, however, it is not known whether and by how much each generalization of SPX price dynamics improves VIX option pricing. This article fills this gap by first deriving a VIX option model that reconciles the most general price processes of the SPX in the literature. The relative empirical performance of several models of distinct interest is examined. Our results show that state‐dependent price jumps and volatility jumps are important for pricing VIX options. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 29:523–543, 2009     

On the valuation of warrants

This article addresses a misconception in the literature concerning the valuation of warrants when a warrant is treated as an option on the stock of the underlying firm. The magnitude and timing of the impact of a warrant issue on the underlying stock price and on the wealth of the firm's shareholders is examined within a continuous‐time arbitrage‐free economy. In particular, it is shown that the stock price of the underlying firm conditionally reflects dilution at all times following the announcement of a warrant issue and notwithstanding that the warrants might not even have been issued yet. Valuing a warrant or convertible security as an option on the post‐announcement underlying stock price means there is no need for any explicit adjustment for dilution to be made to the chosen option pricing model. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 22:765–782, 2002     

Pricing for global markets

Pricing is complex and generally subjective in domestic business. It is even more difficult in international business, with multiple currencies, trade barriers, additional cost considerations, and longer distribution channels. Based on a review of corporate best practices, this article proposes a set of decision rules and processes for international price setting. Specific topics for discussion include: key considerations in international pricing; the location of pricing responsibility in the multinational corporation; approaches to price setting; and transfer pricing practices.     

What drives brands’ price response metrics? An empirical examination of the Chinese packaged goods industry

As competition among CPG brands intensifies in both emerging and developed markets, brand managers increasingly focus on price as the weapon-of-choice. This calls for an assessment of not only their own price response, but also of their competitive pricing power, and its antecedents. The authors propose a set of universally applicable ('etic') and country-specific ('emic') drivers of brand price elasticity, clout, and vulnerability, for the world’s largest emerging market (viz., China). Leveraging a unique and large-scale data set from this market, they find that high price response is not necessarily indicative of high clout, nor does it signal high vulnerability. Hence, all three price response metrics matter. They also uncover marked differences in the impact of brand- and category-level drivers on these three metrics. Established etic factors such as line length, distribution intensity, and stockpilability have a substantial effect on one or more price response metrics. Among the emic factors, Chinese embeddedness, and especially social demonstrance play an important role: it strongly drives down brands’ price elasticity, but also reduces the intensity of price competition in the category and makes brands less vulnerable to rival actions. Foreign brands, in contrast, exhibit higher price response, and do not enjoy higher clout nor lower vulnerability than their domestic counterparts. Hence, they neither benefit from the aura, nor suffer from the liability, of foreignness. Overall, the study adds to empirical generalizations on the impact of price, and helps managers improve the effectiveness of their pricing strategies.     

Too close to be similar: Product and price competition in retail gasoline markets

We examine how product and pricing decisions of retail gasoline stations depend on local market demographics and the degree of competitive intensity in the market. We are able to shed light on the observed empirical phenomenon that proximate gasoline stations price very similarly in some markets, but very differently in other markets. Our analysis of product design and price competition between firms integrates two critical dimensions of heterogeneity across consumers: Consumers differ in their locations and in their travel costs, as in models of horizontal differentiation. They also differ in their relative preference or valuations for product quality dimensions, in terms of the offered station services (such as pay-at-pump, number of service bays or other added services), as in models of vertical differentiation. We find that the degree of local competitive intensity and the dispersion in consumer incomes are sufficient to explain variations in the product and pricing choices of competing firms. Closely located retailers who face sufficient income dispersion across consumers in a local market may differentiate on product design and pricing strategies. In contrast, retailers that are farther apart from each other may adopt similar product design and pricing strategies if the market is relatively homogeneous on income. Using empirical survey data on prices and station characteristics gathered across 724 gasoline stations in the St. Louis metropolitan area, and employing a multivariate logit model that predicts the joint probability of stations within a local market differentiating on product design and pricing strategies as a function of market demographics and local competitive intensity, we find strong support for the central implications of the theory.