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Digitalization and marketing technologies have made it possible to overcome some barriers to pricing – a multidisciplinary field between marketing, finance and IT – and have set the stage for a paradigm shift in the pricing profession. Value creation, the pricing process, and price communication have been transformed by innovative business models and advanced algorithmic and human–machine solutions. This chapter synthesizes the literature to date and provides a comprehensive framework for an all-encompassing 360° pricing approach that broadens the understanding of pricing in the context of digital business across all steps of the price management process. Starting from product attributes and motivational beliefs in consumers' value assessment and adoption of (technological or digital) products or services, new business models and pricing models emerge in the digital economy, human–machine solutions for price implementation and repricing are increasingly applied, and price search and communication take place through a variety of digital communication channels. Each stage of this framework discusses concrete examples, highlighting the freemium strategy, the subscription model, price tracking and repricing tools, and digital price information channels such as e-commerce, marketplace, or price comparison platforms. The implications for price management in a digital, technology-driven landscape are discussed from the executive level to the analyst level.

Businesses understand that digital technologies and applications can create value, but how to capture that value has been elusive. Particularly for established businesses, the practice of applying traditional price structures to new digital platforms has resulted in revenue, market and share deterioration. This article describes how to adapt price structure to digital migration and hybrid digital/pre‐digital product sets.

Based on case studies from entertainment, publishing, education, avionics, gaming and software industries, the article observes how price structure directly transported from pre‐digital products have not been effective in maintaining revenues and margins. Successful digital product introduction requires careful examination of the new capabilities and price drivers of a digital context.

This article shows that frequently the price drivers of digital products require a new price structure. In particular, the unit of measure (e.g. users, downloads, enterprise size, etc.) is critical to success. Typically when product developers choose a measure that most resembles the pre‐digital unit of pricing, results are sub‐optimal. Further, the overall structure must reflect the risks which are often implicit in digital migration – the benefits of sharing and increases in efficacy can often accrue to the buyer, and elude the seller.

Product developers and pricers tend to focus on the similarity between pre‐digital and digital generations of product. Often, they wrongly assume that digital is better for all. However, the context of the product (workflow, applications, scaling, competitors, etc.) can be much more important than the product itself, and pricing must reflect that. As a result of poorly managed digital transitions, industries have seen billions of dollars of revenues wiped out – quite needlessly. This article identifies specific frameworks for minimizing the risk of revenue loss.

The research issues of digital preservation have apparently moved from how to set up the digital archives to on-going business models. The aim of this paper is to investigate the key factors for digital archives' success. This paper provides a business model for the sustainability of digital archives.

Both pricing strategies and business models related to digital archives are very important. From the point of archive preservation, how to preserve digital archives permanently and make them accessible are the most important research issues. This paper, based on a review of the academic literature, adopts the innovative pricing approach to develop the business models and pricing strategy.

The research defines the different needs at start-up versus the on-going operations for digital preservation. Considering digital archives as information goods, this study adopts the TRIZ method to establish a pricing strategy for digital preservation. It discusses the pricing strategy for digital preservation using an innovative method of creative problem-solving theory from the perspectives of the archives institutes, materials providers and consumers.

This study recommends the pricing strategies for the digital preservation programs and the government's price policy based on the TRIZ analysis method.

Purpose – With the rapid proliferation of digital technology for creating and disseminating content in different forms – textual, music, video – both firms and consumers have a number of alternative technology and formats available for creating and consuming content. While this has led to more value for consumers, the firms have had mixed results. Some firms have seen their value erode through the adoption of newer formats as compared to the older ones (e.g., streamed music format vs. CD format), and other firms have been generally reluctant to embrace newer technology and formats for the similar reasons.Design/methodology/approach – In this chapter, we review the research issues in designing and pricing such digital content and formats and the various strategies that firms can adopt in ensuring that both firms and consumers benefit through the use of newer formats.Findings – We review and discuss the extant research in this domain and identify research issues for future research.Value/originality – As more traditional products morph into digital services, it is critical that these issues are addressed so that the content creation industry can survive in the short term and prosper in the long term.

Counterparty risk is usually defined as the risk which stems from the fact that the counterparty of a derivative contract is not solvent before or at expiration. As most of the derivative trading activity has been moving from standardized products quoted on futures‐style markets, towards customized products traded on over‐the‐counter markets, the issue of counterparty risk evaluation has increasingly gathered momentum and is now one of the hot topics in option pricing theory. The corresponding options are named vulnerable.

Digital capabilities in operations and delivery through constant data acquisition and future predictions have accelerated digital servitization through reduced uncertainty. New flexibility in value-capture concepts like dynamic and value-based pricing is introduced, which was impossible before. This paper explores two things. Firstly, how embracing contractual flexibility of price-variance and contract lengths influences customer perceived value in artificial intelligence (AI) enabled digital offerings. Secondly, the role transparency plays in the perceived value of such offerings.

The paper uses an experiment-based survey and quantitative assessment within a business-to-business setup with 137 respondents across a couple of industrial manufacturers in the Nordic region.

The authors observations indicate that value-capture-related flexibilities introduced by digital offerings, namely price fluctuations and longer contract lengths, are perceived to deliver more value to customers than standard offerings with known conditions. The authors findings indicate that introduced flexibilities are perceived as opportunities rather than uncertainties leading to higher perceived value by customers. The increased value perception can be explained by the transparency of these offerings provided by data-driven digital technologies'.

The paper is an original work to understand the value-capture implication of digital servitization. The authors discuss the possibilities of different value-capture strategies that companies can adopt within digital business models.

The purpose of this paper is to aim to evaluate to what extent present e‐business models for digital audio distribution meet the consumer's expectations.

The research method in this paper is particularly based on two empirical studies. In the first study, the supplier side was examined. In this context, 15 e‐business models in the German music market were identified, classified according to two criteria (type of compensation and dependency on the supplier or its technology) and analysed with regard to four aspects “type and volume of content”, “price of content”, “rights of use”, and “additional services”. To evaluate the identified e‐business models, the consumer expectations for digital audio distribution were analysed in a second study. Finally, the results of both studies were compared.

The paper finds that most of the identified e‐business models do not meet all of the fundamental consumer expectations. Either the identified category of e‐business models and its characteristics (e.g. dependency on technology) lead to a conflict with regard to the expectations of the consumers, or the implemented e‐business models reveal discrepancies between the concrete offer and the demand.

The results in the paper are limited to e‐business models for digital audio distribution in the German music market.

The paper shows that, in order to reach more consumers, most of the existing e‐business models have to be modified.

Based on two empirical studies, this paper presents the state‐of‐the‐art of the digital audio distribution in Germany and systematically identifies gaps between the demand and the supply side of digital audio content.

This paper aims to exam the publisher’s online distribution strategies of print books between a reselling and a marketplace channel with the coexistence of e-book. This study extends the study of channel selection to the content products industry.

By constructing a publisher-leader Stackelberg game model, the authors investigate the publisher’s distribution strategies. The retailer holds a digital channel for e-book and reselling and marketplace channels for print books. The authors examine three-channel modes for the print book distribution: a pure reselling channel, a marketplace channel and a hybrid channel.

The results reveal that a hybrid channel always dominates a pure marketplace channel from the publisher’s perspective. Then, only when the print book’s margin cost and the marketplace’s slotting fee are not very high, the publisher prefers the hybrid to a pure reselling channel. The authors also found a Pareto zone where the hybrid channel mode improves publisher’s and retailer’s profits. Furthermore, the publisher is less likely to choose the hybrid channel as the acceptance of e-book increases. The authors also examine the situation where a publisher-authorized third-party distributor runs the marketplace channel and found the results still hold.

This paper fills a theoretical and practical gap for a structured analysis of the content providers’ online distribution channel selection of the physical products and digital products. Different from previous related studies, this study focuses on analyzing physical products’ channel strategies and finds physical products’ cost plays a crucial role in the content provider’s channel decision.

The internet has made it possible to diffuse totally digitized products on a very large scale. The newspaper business is one of the sectors that has been most affected by this technological revolution. Given such products’ uneven commercial success, an analysis of the literature suggests that these mixed results could be explained by the digitized nature of the product combined with a price judged too high. Both these elements reduce the perceived global value of the digital support compared with the print version on paper. To test this proposition, the authors have constructed an experimental design, manipulating the format (digital newspaper vs. print newspaper) and the price (high vs low). The results show that newspaper digitization significantly reduces perceived global value for the consumer compared with the print format. The authors also show that the perceived intangibility of the product exerts a more complex effect on perceived global value: this effect depends on both the nature of the intangibility (mental vs physical) and the cost and benefit analysis.

An experimental study was conducted with two factors: digitalization (print vs digital format) and price (low vs high). The authors carried out a mixed-factor variance analysis and follow Preacher and Hayes procedure to test the hypothesis. A sample of 387 undergraduate students was interviewed in laboratory.

The results show that newspaper digitization significantly reduces (i.e. destroys) perceived global value for the consumer (i.e. it destroys value), compared to the print format. The reuslts also show that the perceived intangibility of the product exerts a more complex effect on perceived global value: this effect depends at the same time on the nature of the intangibility (mental vs physical) and the account taken of costs and benefits.

One major result is the fact that digitizing newspaper strongly destroys its perceived global value for the consumer, compared to the physical alternative. To explain this phenomenon, the product’s perceived intangibility had been considered, as well as how this is related to the perceived costs and benefits. It appears that it has an overall direct negative effect on perceived value; therefore, the more a newspaper format is perceived as physically intangible, the more its perceived global value decreases. Results shows that this loss of value can be counteracted in two different ways, through the indirect effects of costs and benefits.