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Do the 'grand' strategic context characteristics of an acquisition (e.g., business relatedness of buyer and target) determine the integration success of R&D

In a Pay What You Want (PWYW) setting companies empower their customers to fix the prices buyers voluntarily pay for a delivered product or service. The seller agrees to any price (including zero) customers are paying. For about ten years researchers empirically investigate customer reactions to and economic outcomes of this pricing method. The present paper distinguishes PWYW from other voluntary payment mechanisms and reviews 72 English-or German-speaking PWYW publications, which appeared between January 2006 and September 2016 and contain 97 independent empirical data sets. Prior PWYW research is structured with the help of a conceptual framework which incorporates payment procedure design, buyer, seller, focal sales object and market context characteristics as factors potentially influencing customer perceptions of the PWYW scheme and their behavioral reactions to PWYW offers. The review discusses both consistent key findings as well as contradictory results and derives recommendations for future empirical PWYW research efforts.

The label ‘green electricity’ is commonly used to refer to power generated from various renewable natural sources (e.g. wind). The present article develops hypotheses on the effects of eight attitudinal and perceptual characteristics of residential electricity consumers on their propensity to adopt a green electricity supplier. The hypotheses are tested empirically with data generated by means of a standardized telephone survey of 267 household electricity customers of a German regional power supplier. Questionnaire answers are augmented with information derived from the supplier's billing system on a participant's actual annual electricity consumption. Measurement and structural relationship models are obtained via Partial Least Squares analysis. Regardless of a person's level of actual power consumption in the recent past, propensity to adopt green electricity is most strongly influenced by general consumer attitudes towards environmental protection issues and social endorsement of green power use by close social contacts. In the subsample of participants with low actual electricity consumption, the propensity to purchase green energy is significantly positively affected by the weight an individual attaches to electricity prices in supplier selection decisions and the person's belief that his current electricity supplier takes over social responsibility. In contrast, in the subsample of respondents with high actual electricity consumption consumer's willingness to adopt green electricity is significantly enhanced by the degree of perceived dissimilarity among power company offerings. The identification of factors influencing the adoption of green electricity offers both practical implications for marketers of utilities and contributes to the academic knowledge base of a service domain characterized by increasing societal importance.

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