Co-creative pricing (CCP) : a conceptual development of consumers’ participation in pricing practicing in services

Keskustelu yhteisestä arvonluonnista on saavuttanut yhä laajempaa huomiota niin nykypäivän tieteellisteoreettisessa markkinointikirjallisuudessa kuin käytännössä. Suosiosta huolimatta keskustelusta on jäänyt miltei tyystin huomioimatta arvokäsitteen eräs varsin oleellinen ulottuvuus: hinta. Siitä syystä on ensiarvoisen tärkeää tutkia hinnan merkitys arvokäsitteen, yhdessä tuottamisen ja hinnan muodostamassa suhteiden kolmiossa, sillä vaihdannassa hinta on yksi arvonmuodostuksen tärkeimmistä osatekijöistä. Toissijaisia tutkimusmenetelmiä käyttäen, tämän tutkimuksen tarkoitus on pyrkiä käsitteellistämään yhteinen hinnanluonti arvon lisääjänä. Niinikään tutkimus tarjoaa mallinnuksen niistä vallitsevista olosuhteista, jotka ovat arvon muodostuksessa välttämättömiä. Esitetty malli perustaa juurensa palvelumarkkinoinnin Service-Dominant Logic -ajattelusta, muodostaen fuusion yhdessä ARA-mallin ja markkinointikeskustelussa vallalla olevan elämysmarkkinointiajattelun kanssa. Tutkimus edistää yhteisen arvonluonnin tieteellistä keskustelua syventämällä jo olemassa olevaa tietoa arvon muodostuksesta. Lisäksi, tutkimus edistää käytännön tietämystä esittämällä eksploratiivisen avauksen hinnoittelun dynaamisesta yhteisajattelusta haastamalla markkinoijia ajattelemaan myös hinnoittelua uudesta innovatiivisesta yhteiseen arvonluontiin perustuvasta näkökulmasta. Nykyajan asiakkaat ovat yhä halukkaampia, pystyvämpiä sekä resursseiltaan rikkaampia osallistumaan hinnoittelupäätöksiin kuin aikaisemmin. Yhdessä tuotettu arvo hinnoittelun kautta tarjoaa vaihtoehtoisen ajattelutavan pitkään vallinneelle yritysten sisäänpäin suuntautuneelle hinnoitteluajattelulle ja esittää, että kääntämällä katse asiakkaan suuntaan, saavutetaan todellinen arvo, sellaisena kuin asiakas sen määrittelee. Tutkimuksessa esiin tuotu ajattelutapa tarjoaa uusia mahdollisuuksia vaihtoehtoisille hinnoittelumenetelmille sekä palveluinnovaatioille.Co-creation debate has increasingly become a key topic in the contemporary services marketing theory and practice. Domains of co-creation and value have thus far attracted plenty of academic interest, however, there is an evident deficiency of one essential dimension of value: price. In the triangular relation of co-creation, value and price, it is of high importance to research the role of price, as it is one of the prime components contributing to the formation of value in an exchange. Using secondary research methods, this research works towards a conceptualization of CCP and offers a model of the conditions that need to be in place for value through CCP to occur. The model builds its foundations on Service-Dominant Logic debate. Combined together with the ARA model, and the prevalent thinking of experiential marketing, the work contributes to the academic co-creation literature by adding to the knowledge of value creation. Further, it presents an explorative opening of dynamic pricing thinking for practitioners by challenging the marketers to think their pricing from an innovative co-creation based view. Co-created pricing offers an alternative logic to inwardly focused value creation of the firm and suggests that by turning the focus on the customer, the true value, as perceived by the customer, is captured. Today’s customers are increasingly willing, capable and rich in their resources to participate in pricing decisions, thereby offering an opportunity for alternative pricing methods and service innovations

Developing methods for strategic evaluation in agricultural research and production

We analyze instruments to evaluate investment strategies as new options for co-operatives within the wheat production chain. Using a value-based management the extension of our concept, a “cooperative balanced scorecard” is discussed as we propose the further differentiation of the scorecard’s financial perspective. This is a market development-driven approach as cooperatives may be regarded as commodity-price-intermediators for their members. Proposing this approach we use a simple model of conjoint-hedging in intermediating firms within agribusiness.Agribusiness, Wheat Production, Cooperatives, Intermediation, Value-based Management, Commodity Markets., Agricultural and Food Policy,

Identification of Marketing Capabilities: A study on Indian product based B2B Telecom start-ups

New technology based start-ups play a very important role in developing the economy of a country. In India telecom sector has seen unprecedented growth over the decade and this has led to emergence of several telecom related start-ups. However, product based B2Bstart-ups are still rare and they have to undergo several challenges to stay afloat. Surprisingly not much research work has been undertaken in identifying capabilities among early stage start-ups although the early phase represents a very crucial phase for product based firms and in determines the success or failure for start-ups. Present study explores the inherent marketing capabilities that enable commercialization among such early stage start-ups by adopting a multiple case based inductive methodology with Indian telecom start-ups as our context. We have identified market orientation, positioning and segmentation, selling and after sales services as components of marketing capability of such start-ups. We also identify several idiosyncrasies among telecom start-ups vis-�-vis established firms in the sector. Fina lly we make a case for policy level intervention to promote telecom start-ups in the Indian context.

Challenges in the regulation of broadband in Hungary

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A Review of the Monitoring of Market Power The Possible Roles of TSOs in Monitoring for Market Power Issues in Congested Transmission Systems

The paper surveys the literature and publicly available information on market power monitoring in electricity wholesale markets. After briefly reviewing definitions, strategies and methods of mitigating market power we examine the various methods of detecting market power that have been employed by academics and market monitors/regulators. These techniques include structural and behavioural indices and analysis as well as various simulation approaches. The applications of these tools range from spot market mitigation and congestion management through to long-term market design assessment and merger decisions. Various market-power monitoring units already track market behaviour and produce indices. Our survey shows that these units collect a large amount of data from various market participants and we identify the crucial role of the transmission system operators with their access to dispatch and system information. Easily accessible and comprehensive data supports effective market power monitoring and facilitates market design evaluation. The discretion required for effective market monitoring is facilitated by institutional independence.Electricity, liberalisation, market power, regulation

Empirical Studies Of Revenue Management Practices: Understand Your Competition And Customers

This dissertation empirically examines factors that challenge revenue management practices in travel industry --- air-travel and lodging. In particular, it focuses on strategic interactions among firms and strategic interactions between firms and customers. While most traditional revenue management focuses on single firm problems, better understanding competition and customers recently become two emerging themes in both theories and practices of revenue management. Meanwhile, with 20 years\u27 successful implementation of sophisticated revenue management systems in both airline and hotel industries, they have accumulated rich data to better understand threats and opportunities currently facing both industries. Furthermore, with the proliferation of online distribution channels, extensive information has been made available to both customers and competitors. How to utilize such opportunity to understand customers and competition remains a question to both industry professionals and academic researchers. This dissertation contains three parts. The first part studies implications of strategic alliances in the airline industry. Airlines in the same alliance are competitors and partners at the same time. After alliances are formed, airlines\u27 networks are expected to be consolidated and capacity redundancies would be eliminated, as intensity of competition decreases among alliance partners. However, we find that alliance partners seek to overlap more in their networks. We also find evidence that average prices increase by about $11 per one-way segment coupon in markets where two partners are both present. After ruling out other plausible competing mechanisms, we conclude that these findings are most likely driven by multimarket competition. The second part of the dissertation studies travelers\u27 strategic decision to delay purchases in anticipation of price decreases when purchasing air-tickets. By estimating a structural model on booking and posted fare data, we find that 4.9% to 44.9% of the population are strategic, and that incorporating such strategic customer behavior will increase revenues by 3% to 5% in certain city-pair markets. The third part of the dissertation bridges the two themes by applying a consumer-centric lens to better understand competition in hotel industry. Using online search and clickstream data, we propose a methodology to identify key competitors based on which hotels customers have compared. This approach also provides a network view of localized competition structure. We also find that there is approximately 50% mismatch between competition sets perceived by customers and hoteliers. Independent hotels and distant hotels are usually left out of competition sets

Pricing Perishables

 A key feature of food products is their perishability. Within the short marketing window that characterizes most food and ag products, demand is typically highly stochastic and difficult to predict. This combination of features poses substantial challenges to retailers when pricing products and has implications for performance that ripples through vertical food chains. For many food products, processing to forms that can be preserved and held in inventory has traditionally been used as a means of coping with these conditions, despite its high costs and ancillary risks introduced such as change in product attributes and deterioration. This paper presents an alternative ERM strategy that focuses on dynamic pricing to control the rate of sale for perishable products. The paper considers a retailer that has market power to price and supplies perishable products to a market with substitute products and demand originating from heterogeneous consumers. Perishability implies a finite horizon for the marketing of the products over which demand across market segments of consumers is both dynamic and stochastic. Faced with uncertainty, we suppose the firm has limited information about the stochastic properties of demand and must choose a pricing strategy that projects over the market horizon. This price trajectory represents a key control mechanism to cope with uncertainty of both the perishability of the product and of demand

The Value of Observing the Buyer Arrival Time in Dynamic Pricing

We consider a dynamic pricing problem where a firm sells one item to a single buyer in order to maximize expected revenues. The firm commits to a price function over an infinite horizon. The buyer arrives at some random time with a private value for the item. He is more impatient than the seller and strategizes the time of his purchase in order to maximize his expected utility, which implies either buying immediately or waiting to benefit from a lower price. We study how important is to observe the buyer arrival time in terms of the seller's expected revenue. When the seller can observe the arrival of the buyer, she can make the price function contingent on his arrival time. On the contrary, when the seller cannot observe the arrival, her price function is fixed at time zero for the whole horizon. The value of observability (VO) is defined as the worst case ratio between the expected revenue of the seller when she observes the buyer's arrival and that when she does not. First, we show that for the particular case where the buyer's valuation follows a monotone hazard rate distribution, the upper bound is e, and it is tight. Next, we show our main result: In a very general setting about valuation and arrival time distributions, the value of observability is at most 4.911. To obtain this bound we fully characterize the observable arrival setting and use this solution to construct a random and periodic price function for the unobservable case. Finally, we show by solving a particular example to optimality that VO has a lower bound of 1.017.Este documento es una versión del artículo publicado en Management Science (ahead of print