Pricing strategy

More than half of Major League Baseball teams are using dynamic pricing. Others should follow.

An online tool takes objective and subjective factors into account.

Lessons from the head of McKinsey's negotiation practice.

When Ben Franklin wrote Poor Richard’s Almanac and the words, “A little neglect may breed great mischief,” he did not have price fixing in mind. To the 47 executives in companies in the folding-box industry convicted of price fixing, however, the words seem tailored to fit. In those companies convicted under antitrust laws in 1976, […]

This blog post is part of the HBR Online Forum The Future of Retail. Last year on Black Friday, I dropped by a local Staples store in Watertown, Massachusetts, to pick up a few office supplies. Surprised at the 40% off sale on many items, I ended up leaving with a lot of office supplies […]

They're politically popular, but encourage hoarding and exacerbate shortages.

Under pressure to keep costs down, customers may only look at price and not listen to your sales pitch. Help them understand—and believe in—the superior value of your offerings.

Although the roots of capitalism stretch back many centuries, setting prices remains an inexact science. The pricing decision, one of the most important in business, is also one of the least understood. Many industrial companies, according to this author, habitually set prices reflexively on the basis of simple criteria—to recover costs, to maintain or gain […]

A man once worked on the 89th floor of the Empire State Building. One muggy August day, he began to imagine how nice a breeze in his face would feel. When he opened the window, he suddenly realized he could probably get the world’s best breeze in the face—simply by jumping out and falling face […]

An extreme sports company considers a VIP tier.

Three hacks based on behavioral science.

The retail behemoth can no longer rely on only high-volume customers.

When people are your most important asset, some standard performance measures and management practices become misleading or irrelevant. This is a danger...

Early in 1984, the top executives of an East Coast hardware chain made a momentous decision. Without consulting the company’s suppliers, they decided to phase out its fleet of trucks and its network of warehouses. Maintaining this distribution system was costing the company about 5% of annual sales, and the executives believed the company was […]

Augustin Rey, the president of Emilia, a century-old clothing retailer in Spain, is determined to revamp the company's merchandising strategy and redesign...

If consumers accept market prices, so should sellers.

Reviewing how to calculate it and dispelling misconceptions.

They should consider these three ideas instead.

Thanks to behavioral economics, we can now explain with greater precision how price presentation affects willingness to buy and satisfaction with the amount paid. It all comes down to the familiar concept of highlighting customer benefits—yet managers often ignore benefits and focus on cost when pricing products. Our research shows that pricing components according to […]

When a customer buys a product he or she goes through a complex process of balancing the price of the product against the perceived benefits, costs, risks, and value in use of the product. If the customer thinks this way when analyzing a purchase, say these authors, it makes great sense for marketers to set […]