Aims and scope
Research on behavioral and psychological aspects of decision making has witnessed a surge in interest. In a recent, dedicated special issue in SMJ (Powell et al., 2011) Levinthal (2011) asks the question "A behavioral approach to strategy – what's the alternative?". Recent developments in finance, organization theory and marketing have moved behavioral aspects of decision making solidly within mainstream research. The majority of research in this area has been conducted in consumer markets – in many instances with student samples – leaving implications for industrial marketing largely unexplored.
Research examining behavioral and psychological aspects of pricing seeks to understand how customer perceptions of value and price are formed. In contrast to traditional economic theory assuming that prices are the mechanism allowing customers to reveal their preferences, recent research has shown that customer preferences are constructed ad hoc and are heavily context-dependant (Hsee, 1998). Context dependant factors influencing perceptions of value and price include, but are not limited to: advertised reference prices, price and discount presentation formats, decoy options, irrelevant product attributes, framing, anchoring, and asymmetric dominance. Pricing and purchasing decisions in B2B are typically taken by groups – the pricing function and the buying center, respectively – which are subject to a series of well-documented biases: groupthink, deference to authority, delegation of responsibility, conformity bias. These biases could well mean that purchase decisions in B2B are subject to even more biases than purchase decisions in B2C. Finally, these biases very likely affect the processes of price setting within the firm and price negotiation vis-à-vis customers.
Research questions
In this call for papers we aim to shed light on the following non-exhaustive list of research questions:
What is the role of advertised reference prices and different price/discount presentation formats on perceptions of value and price and on purchase intentions in B2B?
How do B2B purchasers and B2B sellers absorb, encode, and memorize prices? Which factors explain price search, price encoding, and price memory in business markets?
How stable are customer preferences in B2B? Are preferences in B2B constructed?
Which factors influence fairness perceptions in business markets?
Prospect theory in B2B: What is the influence of gain/loss framing, status-quo bias and loss aversion on B2B pricing?
How do deference to authority, conformity and groupthink influence rationality in purchase decisions of the B2B buying center?
What is the impact of behavioral biases on the price setting and price negotiation process in business markets?
How do price decision-makers deal with information asymmetry, ambiguity and uncertainty?
What is the role of intuition in pricing decision-making process?