This paper focuses on the factors that significantly influence an individual's decision in establishing a price for a standardised product under so-called pay-what-you-want (PWYW) circumstances. Current research has identified seven influential constructs that are assumed to be the main drivers of consumer behaviour when making a pricing decision in a PWYW environment: fairness, altruism, loyalty, price consciousness, income, satisfaction and reference price. This paper extends the list of influential factors with an additional construct, situational factors and examines the constructs' relative importance with regard to their influence on a PWYW decision. Moreover, the positive effect of personal interaction on a buyer's willingness to pay during a payment situation in the PWYW context was confirmed.

Pay-what-you-want (PWYW) pricing has attracted much attention recently. Current research focused on influencing factors and their power across social contexts and countries. This article empirically examines a comprehensive list of 10 empirically tested factors that influence individual price-setting but never have been investigated holistically. Results indicate: (1) some previously assumed influencing factors have stronger moderating effects than do others, and (2) these influences must be interpreted as influential clusters rather than individually, as not all constructs are of significantly differing influence on an individual's pricing decision. Satisfaction (Cluster 1), price consciousness, and fairness (both Cluster 2) constitute the most crucial moderators, regardless of context. Four country contexts (i.e., Australia, Germany, Poland, United States) revealed further insights about the intercultural perspective of PWYW pricing: Whereas most of the influencing factors/clusters are of comparable importance across the tested countries, loyalty and reputation (Cluster 6) significantly differed in importance depending on country.

The present study investigated perceived price fairness (PPF) and aimed to reveal determinants of PPF within the participative pricing mechanism paywhat-you-want (PWYW). Results support the hypothesis that PPF in PWYW conditions is higher than PPF in ordinary price setting (OPS) conditions. Determinants of PPF in PWYW conditions were identified to include both the price level and the degree of social interaction. Whereas the results conform to previous research that PPF correlates negatively with the price level in OPS conditions, this study reveals a positive correlation between the price level and PPF in PWYW conditions, which suggests that the buyer's mental model of PPF varies with the process of price determination. Therefore, future research should re-examine consequences of PPF in PWYW conditions. Additionally, results show cross-country differences of PPF and the influence of the price level on PPF.

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In this work, we study shear flows of a fluid layer between two solid blocks via a liquid-crystal type model proposed in [C.H.A. Cheng, L.H. Kellogg, S. Shkoller, D.L. Turcotte, A liquidcrystal model for friction, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 21 (2007) 1-5]for an understanding of frictions. A characterization on the existence and multiplicity of steady-states is provided. Stability issue of the steady-states is examined mainly focusing on bifurcations of zero eigenvalues. The stability result suggests that this simple model exhibits hysteresis, and it is supported by a numerical simulation.