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Pricing And Distribution Of Pricing

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FUT pricing has attractive properties compared to usage-based pricing; it reduces utility variance by bundling plan units, and thus it satisfies diverse consumer needs and could thus enhance firm profits. FUT pricing also has a key advantage over flat rate pricing; by having more than one price point, FUT pricing makes it efficient and flexible to accommodate heterogeneous consumer needs, making it possible to increase total social welfare (combination of firm profit and consumer surplus). However, since FUT menu pricing is generally more difficult than flat rate pricing to implement in practice, it is useful to understand “when” and “by how much” FUT pricing can perform better compared to flat rate pricing in terms of firm’s profits, consumer surplus, and social welfare. Therefore, we aim at deriving an optimal solution for FUT menu pricing to both extend the literature on the pricing of information services and also to enhance managerial practice by testing our model with sophisticated analytical and empirical techniques.
FUT menu pricing resembles traditional quantity discounts for physical goods (e.g., Monahan, 1984; Lee and Rosenblatt, 1986; Munson and Rosenblatt, 1998; Corbett and Groote, 2000; Shin and Benton, 2004) in the sense that the unit price for a bigger size plan is discounted. However, unlike its popularity for information services, flat rate pricing is not as popular for physical goods perhaps because of the positive marginal cost associated with each unit

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