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This chapter describes and discusses the coming of age of price consulting from the perspective of Simon, Kucher, and Partners, today the world’s leading price consultancy. Starting with modest beginnings of a predominantly theoretical and methodological nature, the field has evolved into many specializations along measurement, model building, and structural and industry lines. The current stage of development is characterized by an advanced integration of theory and practice. In spite of the big progress, large growth potentials are previewed for the future. Price consulting is today seen as a young adult who still has a lot to learn and can further contribute to the professionalization of price management.

This paper includes an examination of two key issues on price decisions: (1) how should price decisions be made (the strategic and normative issue) within market contexts, and (2) how are price decisions actually made (the execution and implementation of price decisions). The paper closes with some observations useful for applied research and strategies for making effective pricing decisions. The propositions and literature review show that one pricing strategy does not fit a brand in all market contexts that brand executives experience annually in managing brands. Setting specific price points requires continuing deliberate management responses to dynamic market contexts. This paper provides useful sense-making conjunctive steps to accomplish such deliberate thinking effectively relevant for different market contexts.

This chapter summarizes the behavioral pricing research findings of price and how buyers respond to price. This includes the relationship between price and perceived value and the decision heuristics that help us understand how price influences perceptions of value and eventual product choice. Buyers also use price as an indicator of product quality, and customers’ perceptions of quality, benefits, and value affect how they will respond to a purchase situation. In addition, buyers’ perceptions of the sacrifice affect the purchase decision, that is the degree that consumers reflect on the amount that they would “give up” by paying the monetary price for a product may vary according to a variety of situations and conditions, such as type of product or service, or the perceived unfairness of the price, or if the buyer perceives a brand is superior to competing brands. The chapter also discusses how buyers trade off or compare the perceived gains arising from price-quality judgments versus the perceived sacrifice required to acquire the product or service, including whether buyers integrate price and other attribute information following a nonlinear (proportional) or linear (subtractive) process. It also summarizes research on price as a multidimensional attribute, considered with additional dimensions such as warranty coverage, and warrantor reputation. Finally, the chapter examines perceived product value as being decomposed into its (1) perceived acquisition value (the expected benefit to be gained from acquiring the product less the net displeasure of paying for it) and (2) perceived transaction value (the perceived merits or fairness of the offer or deal).

In marketing literature, notions of experience and consumer value have continuously been revisited since early works in the 1980s. This chapter deals with how tourism services are a paradigmatic realm for the analysis and application of the experiential approach by (a) providing evidence of the idiosyncrasy of the experiential approach for tourism services based on their high subjectivity, the relevance of emotions and sensations, their aggregated nature and the many interactions and contexts they provoke, and (b) reviewing previous works applying the experiential perspective to tourism, which are varied and multifaceted. Dimensions of tourism experiential value correspond to cognitive, affective, relational and sensorial aspects, which are present in the various phases of the tourism consumption process. Insights for both researchers and practitioners interested in the world of experiences in tourism are offered, as well as future lines of research to continue the challenge of studying tourism experiences.

The use of social media information for personnel decisions in mergers and acquisitions (M&As) could have greater effects on employees in targeted firms of M&As. Negative information from social media can facilitate employee departures especially during reorganization efforts. Managers should be aware that personnel decisions using information gained from social media could have legal ramifications. As such, appropriate policies concerning social media should be in place to guide organizational decision making. Although social media has been a part of society and business, research on its influences on human resources, employment decisions, and organizational behaviors has been limited. As such, this paper reviewed the current literature on social media and suggested ways to advance studies in the field.

The general theory of behavioral strategies includes a set of propositions supporting alternative configurations of objectives, contextual features, and beliefs/assessments by executives. The theory includes the outcomes of selections of specific decision alternatives. Building behavioral-strategy models in contexts enriches one or more goals of science and practice: description, understanding, prediction, and influence/control. This chapter is a primer to the general theory. A brief review of relevant empirical studies supports the general theory. The empirical studies include the use of alternative data collection and analytically tools including true field experiments, think aloud methods, long interviews, statistical hypothesis testing, ethnographic decision tree modeling, and building and testing algorithms (e.g., qualitative comparative analysis, QCA). The general theory is the blending of cognitive science, economics, marketing, psychology, and implemented practices in explicit contexts. Consequently, behavioral-strategy theory is distinct from context-free microeconomics, market-driven, and competitor-only decision-making. Capturing and reporting contextually driven alternative routines to strategy setting by a compelling set of propositions represents what is particularly new and valuable about the general theory. The general theory serves as a useful foundation for advances theory and improving the practice of implemented strategies.

This chapter traces the development of the pricing research program of Kent Monroe, beginning with his doctoral dissertation and continuing to the present time. Drawing on psychophysics and adaptation-level theory the early research efforts concentrated on validating two important concepts relative to behavioral pricing research: reference price and acceptable price range. Then the behavioral pricing research program expanded to explore how the context of a purchase situation, including the structure of the prices available for judgment, influences buyers' price perceptions and willingness to buy. In the early years his research included pricing models and research on patronage behavior. Subsequently, concentrating primarily on behavioral pricing research, he began to integrate findings from the research program into examining how various sellers pricing strategies and tactics influence buyers' judgments and purchase decisions. These efforts led to the first edition of his book Pricing – Making Profitable Decisions published in 1979. The book was subsequently revised and expanded in 1990 and again in 2003.

Economic theory posits a universal sociocultural orientation toward pricing complicated only by systematic cognitive biases. While institutional and organizational theorists have challenged the purported homogeneity of market logics, they have not linked market heterogeneity to price outcomes. If market logics are internally complex with multiple orientations toward pricing, skilled actors should be able to influence prices through market logics. This study utilizes qualitative analysis of interview data with a stratified random sample (75 percent response rate) of key participants to examine how investment banks (underwriters) instantiate a hybrid market logic in the Initial Public Offering (IPO) market. Underwriters exploit their status position to promulgate IPO pricing methods contradicting neoclassical rationality, behavioral models of pricing, and the underwriters’ own calculative mode of behavior. They successfully create this hybrid logic for issuers while hiding the nature of their market power through deceptive use of vocabulary from the market logic itself. Hence, the internal complexity of market logics directly impacts financial prices, with skilled actors achieving superior outcomes. This study concludes with an assessment of the implications for price theory, developing propositions to guide future research on market logics and pricing.

Economic theory posits a universal sociocultural orientation toward pricing complicated only by systematic cognitive biases. While institutional and organizational theorists have challenged the purported homogeneity of market logics, they have not linked market heterogeneity to price outcomes. If market logics are internally complex with multiple orientations toward pricing, skilled actors should be able to influence prices through market logics. This study utilizes qualitative analysis of interview data with a stratified random sample (75 percent response rate) of key participants to examine how investment banks (underwriters) instantiate a hybrid market logic in the Initial Public Offering (IPO) market. Underwriters exploit their status position to promulgate IPO pricing methods contradicting neoclassical rationality, behavioral models of pricing, and the underwriters’ own calculative mode of behavior. They successfully create this hybrid logic for issuers while hiding the nature of their market power through deceptive use of vocabulary from the market logic itself. Hence, the internal complexity of market logics directly impacts financial prices, with skilled actors achieving superior outcomes. This study concludes with an assessment of the implications for price theory, developing propositions to guide future research on market logics and pricing.