Pay What You Want (PWYW) can be an attractive marketing strategy to price discriminate between fairminded and selfish customers, to fully penetrate a market without giving away the product for free, and to undercut competitors that use posted prices. We report on laboratory experiments that identify causal factors determining the willingness of buyers to pay voluntarily under PWYW. Furthermore, to see how competition affects the viability of PWYW, we implement markets in which a PWYW seller competes with a traditional seller. Finally, we endogenize the market structure and let sellers choose their pricing strategy. The experimental results show that outcome-based social preferences and strategic considerations to keep the seller in the market can explain why and how much buyers pay voluntarily to a PWYW seller. We find that PWYW can be viable in isolation, but it is less successful as a competitive strategy because it does not drive traditional posted-price sellers out of the market. Instead, the existence of a posted-price competitor reduces buyers' payments and prevents the PWYW seller from fully penetrating the market. If given the choice, the majority of sellers opt for setting a posted price rather than a PWYW pricing. We discuss the implications of these results for the use of PWYW as a marketing strategy.

the two anonymous JMR reviewers, and seminar participants at several marketing departments around the country, where he presented a version of this article in 2002. ROBERT ZEITHAMMER*At Internet auction sites, such as eBay, nearly identical goods are often sold in a sequence of auctions, separated by small amounts of time. Upcoming auctions are announced several days in advance, so buyers can benefit from forward-looking strategies that take this information into account. This article develops a model of such bidding, provides empirical evidence of the model's relevance to actual behavior on eBay, and discusses the general implications of forward-looking bidding for sequential, auction-driven marketplaces.

Decisions about life annuities are an important part of consumer decumulation of retirement assets, yet are relatively underexplored by marketing researchers studying consumer financial decision-making. In this paper we propose and estimate a model of individual preferences for life annuity attributes using a choice-based stated-preference survey. Annuities are presented in terms of consumer-relevant attributes such as monthly income, yearly adjustments, period certain guarantees, and company financial strength. We find that attributes directly influence preferences beyond their impact on the annuity's expected present value. The strength of the direct influence depends on how annuities are described: when represented only via basic attributes, consumers undervalue inflation protection and preferences are not monotonically increasing in duration of period certain guarantees. When descriptions are enriched with cumulative payment information, consumers no longer undervalue inflation protection, but nonlinear preferences for period certain options remain. We find that among annuities with the same expected payout but different annual increases and period certain guarantees, the proportion of consumers choosing the annuity over self-management can vary by more than a factor of two. With baby boomers now retiring at the rate of almost 10,000 per day, the issue of decumulation of retirement assets is increasingly important to economists, public policy experts, and the financial services industry. It should also be of interest to researchers in marketing because consumers in the market for decumulation products, such as annuities, face a choice problem with large financial stakes, limited learning opportunities, difficult consumption tradeoffs, multiple sources of uncertainty, issues of trust and branding, and long time periods. All of these aspects of the decumulation problem are topics on which marketing research can offer important insights. This paper studies the structure of consumer preferences for life annuities -an important class of decumulation products. We employ a choice-based conjoint analysis to measure consumer preferences and relate them to the underlying financial value of the products. KeywordsAnnuities, as well as many other financial products, provide a unique setting for choice modeling because most annuity attributes have calculable expected present value that can be directly compared to consumers' revealed utilities. Consequently, we are able to see whether an attribute influences demand only through its contribution to the normative net present financial value of the annuity product ("NPV"), or whether attribute values have psychological worth "beyond NPV." We find that a typical consumer choosing from a set of annuities does not merely maximize the expected financial value, but also reacts to several product attributes directlyexpressing preferences beyond the effect of attributes on the financial value. For example, most consumers overvalue medium (10-20 years) levels of period-certa...

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Pay What You Want (PWYW) can be an attractive marketing strategy to price discriminate between fairminded and selfish customers, to fully penetrate a market without giving away the product for free, and to undercut competitors that use posted prices. We report on laboratory experiments that identify causal factors determining the willingness of buyers to pay voluntarily under PWYW. Furthermore, to see how competition affects the viability of PWYW, we implement markets in which a PWYW seller competes with a traditional seller. Finally, we endogenize the market structure and let sellers choose their pricing strategy. The experimental results show that outcome-based social preferences and strategic considerations to keep the seller in the market can explain why and how much buyers pay voluntarily to a PWYW seller. We find that PWYW can be viable in isolation, but it is less successful as a competitive strategy because it does not drive traditional posted-price sellers out of the market. Instead, the existence of a posted-price competitor reduces buyers' payments and prevents the PWYW seller from fully penetrating the market. If given the choice, the majority of sellers opt for setting a posted price rather than a PWYW pricing. We discuss the implications of these results for the use of PWYW as a marketing strategy.

Driven by the low transaction costs and interactive nature of the internet, customer participation in the price-setting process has increased. These changes were first brought about by the rise of online auctions in the early 2000s, followed by the emergence of newer participative mechanisms.Today, platforms such as eBay have popularized online auctions on a global scale, Priceline has made headlines with its name-your-own-price (NYOP) business model, and Humble Bundle has enabled independent musicians and game developers to market their works through pay-what-youwant (PWYW) pricing. Advertising exchanges conduct several hundred million individual auctions per day to sell online advertising slots. These are just a few examples of participative pricing in transactions among consumers or businesses. In parallel, academic research on participative pricing has blossomed in recent years, with an overarching concern over the profitability and other marketing implications these mechanisms have on sellers and buyers.The present paper contributes to this literature in three ways. First, we propose a definition of participative pricing mechanisms, as well as a useful taxonomy. Second, we discuss the current understanding by synthesizing conceptual and empirical academic literature. Third, we outline promising research questions with a key focus on the related behavioral aspects of buyers and sellers.3

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With increasing numbers of consumers in auction marketplaces, we highlight some recent approaches that bring additional economic, social, and psychological factors to bear on existing economic theory to better understand and explain consumers' behavior in auctions. We also highlight specific research streams that could contribute towards enriching existing economic models of bidding behavior in emerging market mechanisms. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. 2005auctions, bidding, economic psychology, social dynamics, experimental economics,