The Pay-What-You-Want Game: What can be learned from the experimental evidence on Dictator and Trust Games?

Matthias Greiff and Henrik Egbert ()

Bulgarian Economic Papers from Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Sofia University St Kliment Ohridski - Bulgaria // Center for Economic Theories and Policies at Sofia University St Kliment Ohridski

Abstract: This paper introduces the Pay-What-You-Want game which represents the interaction between a buyer and a seller in a Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW) situation. The PWYW game embeds the dictator game and the trust game as subgames. This allows us to use previous experimental studies with the dictator and the trust game to identify three factors that can influence the success of PWYW pricing in business practice: (i) social context, (ii) social information, and (iii) deservingness. Only few cases of PWYW pricing for a longer period of time have been documented. By addressing repeated games, we isolate two additional factors which are likely to contribute to successful implementations of PWYW as a long term pricing strategy. These are (iv) communication and (v) the reduction of goal conflicts. The central contribution of this study is an attempt to bridge the gap between laboratory experiments and the research on PWYW pricing, which relies largely on evidence from the field. By reviewing the relevant experiments, this study identifies factors crucial for the success of PWYW pricing and provides guidance to developing long-term applications of PWYW pricing.

Keywords: Pay-What-You-Want; PWYW Game; pricing; dictator game; trust game (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C90 D12 D49 M21 M30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2017-05, Revised 2017-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-gth, nep-mkt and nep-soc
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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https://www.uni-sofia.bg/index.php/eng/content/dow ... file/BEP-2017-05.pdf First version, 2017 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Pay-What-You-Want game: What can be learned from the experimental evidence on Dictator and Trust Games? (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sko:wpaper:bep-2017-05

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