Ein Verständnis der unterschiedlichen Wirkungsweisen des Einführungspreises einer radikalen Innovation ist notwendig für die erfolgreiche Bepreisung und somit den Innovationserfolg. Die Studie gibt Aufschluss, inwieweit der Preis als Mittel zur Überwindung kundenseitiger Adoptionsbarrieren geeignet ist.

The present article explores price fairness perceptions in the specific setting of new product launch prices. In this context, the process of forming price fairness judgments by comparing the price to be judged with the price in a reference transaction is thwarted by the fact that reference transactions are not readily available. Following the conceptual logic on the development of price fairness judgments, results from three experimental consumer studies reveal that price fairness is the key link between launch price and adoption intention but that this relationship is moderated by transaction similarity and social norms. More specifically, transaction similarity, captured by the degree of product newness and future expected price change, determines the comparators consumers will use in their evaluative effort and mitigates the negative launch price-perceived price fairness relationship. In consequence, consumers use existing products to judge prices of incrementally new products. Given the reduced similarity of reference transactions for really new products, consumers rather rely on future prices in their price fairness judgments providing evidence for consumers' forward-looking evaluation. The present study captures social norms by the concept of consumer innovativeness and results demonstrate that due to the inherent uncertainty of really new products, consumer innovativeness influences the extent to which individuals engage in price comparisons when judging the fairness of launch prices of these products. The authors conclude by deriving implications for the price setting of new products.

This study presents a conceptual replication of the effect of partitioned prices on consumer responses in a subscription service setting. Contrasting Morwitz/Greenleaf/Johnson’s (1998) seminal article, the results of an online experiment reveal that consumers are more likely to buy a subscription service with a partitioned tariff (i.e., a pay-per-use tariff) than with a combined tariff (i.e., a flat rate). This effect occurs even though all consumers are aware of the correct billing price and the billing price is identical in both conditions. However, the negative effect of the partitioned (vs. the combined) tariff on consumer responses is mitigated by high levels of need for cognition. Intriguingly, consumers extremely high in need for cognition show a reversed effect pattern when examining perceived price fairness as the dependent variable, that is, they perceive the partitioned tariff to be fairer than the combined tariff.

Companies increasingly rely on pricing teams to master the complexity of pricing a new product. However, little is known about how firms should design such pricing teams. In this study, pricing teams are defined as two or more professionals within a firm who are formally or informally involved in the decision‐making process with regard to the pricing strategy for a new product. Drawing on the information‐processing view of organizational design, this study presents a framework of how pricing teams develop effective pricing strategies for such new products. Specifically, the authors provide evidence that rationality and intuition are two key pricing team information‐processing modes that drive the effectiveness of a new product's pricing strategy. The authors examine how pricing team characteristics—stability, experience, size, autonomy, and functional diversity—enable pricing teams to apply rationality and intuition when developing a new product's pricing strategy. Using data gathered from managers involved in pricing team decisions, the authors demonstrate that pricing teams can be designed to enable the application of pricing team rationality and intuition in this realm, thereby driving effectiveness of the pricing strategy. Product innovativeness moderates these relationships. Specifically, while pricing team rationality has an unambiguously positive effect on pricing strategy effectiveness, pricing team intuition is functional for high levels of product innovativeness and dysfunctional for low levels of product innovativeness. Consequently, managers should not inhibit intuitive decision‐making processes under all circumstances but allow intuition to complement rational decision‐making in the development of pricing strategies for really new products. Choosing the right pricing team design can facilitate the effective use of rationality and intuition.

High failure rates of digital innovations by start-ups indicate that consumers' initial trust perceptions are make-or-break for their survival. Hence, start-ups have to design adequate business models to manage consumers' initial trust perceptions of digital innovations. Five experiments explore how start-ups can signal trustworthiness in order to overcome low initial trust perceptions and boost adoption. We find three specific design strategies of start-ups' digital business models – customer ratings, benefit communication, and revenue model – to be effective to overcome low initial trust perceptions and to increase adoption of digital innovations. The findings demonstrate that initial trust serves as a critical mediator in the relationship between these design strategies and consumers' adoption intentions. Additionally, the chosen revenue model has differential effects on privacy concerns, which mediate the relationship between revenue model and initial trust. The present empirical insights help start-ups to craft business model design strategies for successful digital innovation launch.