Special issue in Industrial Marketing Management "Behavioral and psychological
aspects of B2B pricing" (submission deadline 31 July 2013)
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 whats 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-ΰ-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?
Submission deadline: 31 July 2013
About Industrial Marketing Management
IMM is a prime journal dedicated to B2B marketing with a 5 year impact factor
of 2,376 which compares favorably to International Journal of Research in
Marketing (2,467) and Marketing Letters (1,492) or Psychology & Marketing
(2,124).
For more information:
please visit the homepage of IMM and the attached word document.
http://www.journals.elsevier.com/industrial-marketing-management/call-for-
papers/behavioral-and-psychological-aspects-of-b2b-pricing/
Next steps:
We welcome your submission; to facilitate planning, please let us know your
intention to submit already now: [log in to unmask] (Dr Andreas
Hinterhuber) and [log in to unmask] (Dr Stephan Liozu).
Thank you
Andreas Hinterhuber
Partner, Hinterhuber & Partners
Strategy Pricing Leadership
Innsbruck, Austria
Phone: +43 664 402 7 402
[log in to unmask]
www.hinterhuber.com
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