Empirical Assessment of Dynamic Pricing Preference

Abstract

With the emergence of e-commerce in late nineties dynamic pricing increasingly came into the focus of applied market design, especially for B2B and B2C applications (Bichler & Werthner 2000). However,the e-commerce bubble burst that followed in the years 2002 and 2003 put a huge setback to automated pricing acceptance. At this time the attitude of business and consumers, who were originally open-minded toward a new kind of market making, turned into a sceptical view of dynamic pricing methods. To introduce this kind of method into new application areas, like the ISIP provision, where dynamic pricing seems to be highly adequate, it is necessary to evaluate the present attitude of companies toward the implications, application potentials, perceived hurdles and chances for dynamic pricing. With these arguments in mind it would be easier to react to the doubts while constructing economic and technical market solutions for ISIP solutions in the Internet. For this reason, a German industry survey on this topic was carried out in 2004 in the context of a series of surveys on enterprises’ attitude to Internet use.¹