Accountants are often asked for advice on pricing products, and their input is often quite helpful and necessary. Accountants, however, are very likely to focus on costs when trying to advise management on appropriate pricing strategies. Economists might focus on rules for maximizing short-run...

A small change in prices can have a significant impact on profits and it is therefore becoming crucial for firms to use innovative approaches to pricing. Smart pricing is a dynamic approach to pricing that requires that firms have accurate information about market demand and profit margins on...

This article demonstrates how various concepts derived from marketing and behavioral economics can be useful to accountants and others whose advice is sought on the setting of prices. In particular, it shows that a one-price policy may not always be ideal. Using price as a strategic tool can...

In a segmented waiting-line system, customers are segmented into two groups: those who are willing to wait for service and those who are willing to pay a premium to avoid a long wait. The use of waiting line segmentation has been shown to result in increased profit for the company or...

Textbooks present the three 'degrees' of price discrimination as a sequence of independent pricing methods. These textbook treatments consequently provide inadequate insight as to when a firm might adopt a particular pricing strategy. The paper describes an information-based taxonomy of price...

The so called flat-rate bias is a well documented phenomenon caused by consumers' desire to be insured against fluctuations in their billing amounts. This paper shows that expectation-based loss aversion provides a formal explanation for this bias. We solve for the optimal two-part tariff when...

The so called flat-rate bias is a well documented phenomenon caused by consumers’ desire to be insured against fluctuations in their billing amounts. This paper shows that expectation-based loss aversion provides a formal explanation for this bias. We solve for the optimal two-part tariff when...

In empirical demand, industrial organization, and labor economics, prices are often unobserved or unobservable since they may only be recorded when an agent transacts. In the absence of any additional information, this partial observability of prices is known to lead to a number of identi?cation...

Cost cap tariffs are pay-per-use tariffs for which costs cannot exceed a predefined cost limit. They were recently introduced to telecommunications markets, but were previously also applied in the insurance industry as deductibles or in the rental industry as day rates. This paper develops and...

Standard media economics models imply that increased platform competition decreases ad levels and that mergers reduce per-viewer ad prices. The empirical evidence, however, is mixed. We attribute the theoretical predictions to the combined assumptions that there is no advertising congestion and...