Customer behavior and adoption · Laboratory experiments varying PWYW, posted-price competition, and seller pricing-strategy choice
Pay What You Want as a Marketing Strategy in Monopolistic and Competitive Markets
Klaus M. Schmidt, Martin Spann, Robert Zeithammer (2014). Pay What You Want as a Marketing Strategy in Monopolistic and Competitive Markets. Management Science. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1946
Plain-English take
Outcome-based social preferences and strategic considerations explain voluntary payments; posted-price competition lowers payments, prevents full market penetration, and most sellers choose posted prices when given the choice.
How much weight to give this
3/5 Empirical evidence with some design limits
The 1–5 evidence-check score is a practical reading aid, not a formal peer review or a probability that a conclusion is true. It combines design strength (2 points), sample reporting (1), comparison/control clarity (1), and how much of the paper could be checked (1). Access affects how confidently this directory can assess a study, not the study's underlying quality. Blinding is reported separately because it is not relevant to every design.
Laboratory experiments varying PWYW, posted-price competition, and seller pricing-strategy choice
Experimental buyers and sellers in monopolistic and competitive market environments
Comparison details need confirmation in the full paper.
Only the publisher page was checked; full-text methods are not established.
Double-blind? Blinding was not established from the publisher page; this is not evidence that blinding was or was not used.
Research question
What the authors investigated
Pay What You Want as a Marketing Strategy in Monopolistic and Competitive Markets?
Design
Laboratory experiments varying PWYW, posted-price competition, and seller pricing-strategy choice
Sample and setting
Experimental buyers and sellers in monopolistic and competitive market environments
Reported result
What the study found
Outcome-based social preferences and strategic considerations explain voluntary payments; posted-price competition lowers payments, prevents full market penetration, and most sellers choose posted prices when given the choice.
This is a paraphrase of the source. Check the original paper for definitions, estimates, statistical uncertainty and analysis details.
Scope and transfer
Limitations to keep in view
Laboratory market choices and constructed competition may not capture real purchasing stakes, repeat relationships, or operational constraints in commercial PWYW deployments. The accessible publisher page was used for this listing; correction history was not independently checked.
Possible founder application
Use as a bounded example of pay what you want as a marketing strategy in monopolistic and competitive markets; compare its context and design with your own market before applying its result.
Evidence access
Publisher article page; full-text availability varies and was not established in this review.
The article reports laboratory experiments with monopolistic and competitive markets and finds PWYW can be viable in monopoly but is less successful against a posted-price competitor. Publisher page was directly retrieved; detailed full-text methods were not independently verified.
If only an abstract or metadata was available, the profile is limited to claims supported there. A paper's paywall does not change its evidentiary status, but it limits what we can substantiate from accessible text.