Exploring the Pay-What-You-Want payment motivation

a r t i c l e i n f o Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW) pricing is becoming increasingly popular in real-world applications, especially for cultural services and digital goods. Yet very little is known about the factors related to the customers' motivation of paying (e.g., fairness, getting a bargain). This research explores the relevance, the relative importance of these factors in PWYW contexts, and their impact on customers' payments. Five empirical studies provide a basis for a conceptual framework of PWYW pricing. Four of these studies find (in line with the prior literature) the importance and the relevance of fairness, customer satisfaction, and income. Furthermore, avoiding feelings of guilt is found to be a relevant and relatively important factor that also drives PWYW payments. This has so far not been acknowledged in the literature. In the fifth study, textual cues are applied to examine the manageability of the factors. Their presence does not affect PWYW payments in most cases. Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW) is a pricing approach which entails the buyer (rather than the seller) of a product (goods or service) setting the price of it. The buyer can set any price above or equal to zero, and the seller may not reject the buyer's offer (see also Kim, Natter, & Spann, 2009). PWYW is becoming increasingly popular in real-world applications , especially for services (e.g., restaurants, museums, zoos) and digital goods (e.g., music and video game downloads). Economic and marketing scholars are conducting research in order to better understand this new pricing concept (e. but still very little is known about the relevance, importance, and manageability of such variables. This research explores the relevance, the relative importance of motivation-related factors (e.g., fairness, getting a bargain), and their impact on customers' PWYW payments. Five empirical studies contribute to the PWYW literature in the following ways: First, the studies provide a basis for a conceptual and/or theoretical framework of PWYW pricing. Their purpose is not to review existing theory, but to gain generalizable empirical evidence on variables that drive PWYW payments. A catalog of motivation-related payment factors emerges from studying different PWYW applications (animal park, sauna, museum, zoo). Differences from findings to the existing literature will yield new insights, while similarities will strengthen existing findings and extend them to alternative applications. Second, this research is the first of its kind to study the impact of simple textual motivation-related cues on PWYW payments. The main …