The objectives of this study are to describe experiences in price setting and how pricing has been used to attain better coverage, quality, financial protection, and health outcomes. It builds on newly commissioned case studies and lessons learned in calculating prices, negotiating with providers, and monitoring changes. Recognising that no single model is applicable to all settings, the study aimed to generate best practices and identify areas for future research, particularly in low- and middle-income settings. The report and the case studies were jointly developed by the OECD and the WHO Centre for Health Development in Kobe (Japan).
In Smart Pricing: How Google, Priceline and Leading Businesses Use Pricing Innovation for Profitability, Wharton professors and renowned pricing experts Jagmohan Raju and Z. John Zhang draw on examples from high tech to low tech, from consumer markets to business markets, and from U.S. to abroad, to tell the stories of how innovative pricing strategies can help companies create and capture value as well as customers. They teach the pricing principles behind those innovative ideas and practices. Smart Pricing introduces many innovative approaches to pricing, as well as the research and insights that went into their creation. Filled with illustrative examples from the business world, readers will learn about restaurants where customers set the price, how Google and other high-tech firms have used pricing to remake whole industries, how executives in China successfully start and fight price wars to conquer new markets. Smart Pricing goes well beyond familiar approaches like cost-plus, buyer-based pricing, or competition-based pricing, and puts a wide variety of pricing mechanisms at your disposal. This book helps you understand them, choose them, and use them to win.
Why do consumer prices and wages adjust so slowly to changes in market conditions? The rigidity or stickiness of price setting in business is central to Keynesian economic theory and a key to understanding how monetary policy works, yet economists have made little headway in determining why it occurs. Asking About Prices offers a groundbreaking empirical approach to a puzzle for which theories abound but facts are scarce. Leading economist Alan Blinder, along with co-authors Elie Canetti, David Lebow, and Jeremy B. Rudd, interviewed a national, multi-industry sample of 200 CEOs, company heads, and other corporate price setters to test the validity of twelve prominent theories of price stickiness. Using everyday language and pertinent scenarios, the carefully designed survey asked decisionmakers how prominently these theoretical concerns entered into their own attitudes and thought processes. Do businesses tend to view the costs of changing prices as prohibitive? Do they worry that lower prices will be equated with poorer quality goods? Are firms more likely to try alternate strategies to changing prices, such as warehousing excess inventory or improving their quality of service? To what extent are prices held in place by contractual agreements, or by invisible handshakes? Asking About Prices offers a gold mine of previously unavailable information. It affirms the widespread presence of price stickiness in American industry, and offers the only available guide to such business details as what fraction of goods are sold by fixed price contract, how often transactions involve repeat customers, and how and when firms review their prices. Some results are surprising: contrary to popular wisdom, prices do not increase more easily than they decrease, and firms do not appear to practice anticipatory pricing, even when they can foresee cost increases. Asking About Prices also offers a chapter-by-chapter review of the survey findings for each of the twelve theories of price stickiness. The authors determine which theories are most popular with actual price setters, how practices vary within different business sectors, across firms of different sizes, and so on. They also direct economists' attention toward a rationale for price stickiness that does not stem from conventional theory, namely a strong reluctance by firms to antagonize or inconvenience their customers. By illuminating how company executives actually think about price setting, Asking About Prices provides an elegant model of a valuable new approach to conducting economic research.
"The primary theme of Pricing Strategies is that pricing should be guided by the marketing concept, which indicates that success is achieved through a focus on the needs and sensitivities of the customer. This customer-focus theme is evident throughout the text. The author helps to overcome the mathematical anxieties of students with an intuitive approach to understanding basic pricing concepts, and presents mathematical techniques as simply more detailed specifications of these concepts"--Provided by publisher.
The world’s foremost expert on pricing strategy shows how this mysterious process works and how to maximize value through pricing to company and customer. In all walks of life, we constantly make decisions about whether something is worth our money or our time, or try to convince others to part with their money or their time. Price is the place where value and money meet. From the global release of the latest electronic gadget to the bewildering gyrations of oil futures to markdowns at the bargain store, price is the most powerful and pervasive economic force in our day-to-day lives and one of the least understood. The recipe for successful pricing often sounds like an exotic cocktail, with equal parts psychology, economics, strategy, tools and incentives stirred up together, usually with just enough math to sour the taste. That leads managers to water down the drink with hunches and rules of thumb, or leave out the parts with which they don’t feel comfortable. While this makes for a sweeter drink, it often lacks the punch to have an impact on the customer or on the business. It doesn’t have to be that way, though, as Hermann Simon illustrates through dozens of stories collected over four decades in the trenches and behind the scenes. A world-renowned speaker on pricing and a trusted advisor to Fortune 500 executives, Simon’s lifelong journey has taken him from rural farmers’ markets, to a distinguished academic career, to a long second career as an entrepreneur and management consultant to companies large and small throughout the world. Along the way, he has learned from Nobel Prize winners and leading management gurus, and helped countless managers and executives use pricing as a way to create new markets, grow their businesses and gain a sustained competitive advantage. He also learned some tough personal lessons about value, how people perceive it, and how people profit from it. In this engaging and practical narrative, Simon leaves nothing out of the pricing cocktail, but still makes it go down smoothly and leaves you wanting to learn more and do more—as a consumer or as a business person. You will never look at pricing the same way again.
Winner, 2022 Leonard L. Berry Marketing Book Award, American Marketing Association How do leaders, managers, and proprietors go about the essential task of setting prices? What biases enter into this process, and why? How can a business debias its price setting to become more productive, strategic, and profitable? Combining perceptive insights from behavioral economics with leading-edge ideas on price management, this book offers a new approach to pricing. Gerald Smith demonstrates why understanding, reframing, and refining everyday pricing processes—a firm’s or manager’s pricing orientation—results in a better long-term pricing strategy. He explores how pricing actually happens in practice and shows how to identify and remove the psychological blinders that cause suboptimal decisions and policies. Smith details how to improve pricing orientation by combining the soft behavioral skills that intuitively shape and refine pricing practice with the hard analytic skills that guide and structure pricing strategy. The result is more rational and more profitable pricing—with respect to not only revenue and profitability but also employee productivity and customer satisfaction. Offering an accessible and actionable model, Getting Price Right is the first book to apply behavioral economics to managerial price setting. It is a must-read for corporate business leaders, thought leaders, and professionals interested in advances in pricing and for managers, entrepreneurs, proprietors, and small and midsize business owners whose everyday work involves pricing.
Furnishes a practical and easy-to-understand guide on how to use pricing to increase hidden profits and develop new growth opportunities, offering helpful advice, strategies, and techniques for increasing profit margins. 20,000 first printing.
This clear, precisely written text presents an important branch of the modern, micro-economically based theory of industrial organization and of public finance, utilizing calculus only. Answers are provided to some pertinent economic questions, such as the pricing policies of vote-seeking politicians, of empire-building bureaucrats and of out-put-maximizing and energy-saving public utilities. These policies are compared with the welfare economic benchmark rules e.g. on marginal cost pricing and Ramsey pricing. Great significance is attached to price regulation. The book elucidates the recent replacement of rate of return regulation by price-cap regulation. It also explains why many simple rules like yardstick regulation fail to achieve optimal prices, which shows how complicated it is to induce managers to truthfully reveal their private information. How this can be achieved properly is shown in various principal-agent models on regulation with uncertain costs, uncertain demand and with soft budget constraints.
How to Use Price to Increase Demand, Profit and Customer Satisfaction HOW SMART IS YOUR PRICING? For any business, deciding how much to charge for a product or service is crucial. By gaining an insight into the way consumers think and purchase, you can generate more demand, more customer value – and more profit. MAXIMISE REVENUE • How do unwanted products Influence what customers expect to pay? • How does offering extras for free dramatically increases Perceived Value? • Why does changing the timing of a payment make people pay 50% More? TRIED AND TESTED TECHNIQUES Written by the founder of Inon, a leading pricing consultancy, whose clients range from the BBC and Grant’s Whisky to Alzheimer’s Disease International and HM Treasury, The Psychology of Price provides an insight into the strategies used by multinational corporations. Leigh Caldwell is a pricing expert and leading researcher in behavioural economics, writing the UK’s most popular behavioural blog (www.knowingandmaking.com) and appearing as a frequent guest on BBC News. By background a mathematician and economist, he is the founder and chief executive of Inon, the UK’s leading pricing consultancy.
(Black & White version) Fundamentals of Business was created for Virginia Tech's MGT 1104 Foundations of Business through a collaboration between the Pamplin College of Business and Virginia Tech Libraries. This book is freely available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10919/70961 It is licensed with a Creative Commons-NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 license.
