I do not want to set my own price! Indirect effects of emotions and moderation effects of skepticism explain reduced use intentions towards participative pricing models

PLOS ONE RESEARCH ARTICLE I do not want to set my own price! Indirect effects of emotions and moderation effects of skepticism explain reduced use intentions towards participative pricing models Regina Wittstock-Lang ID1☯, Magdalena Bekk ID1,2*, Matthias Spörrle ID1☯ 1 Department of Business and Economic Psychology, Seeburg Castle University, Seekirchen am Wallersee, Austria, 2 Department of Marketing and Brand Management, University of Cologne, Köln, Germany a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Wittstock-Lang R, Bekk M, Spörrle M (2023) I do not want to set my own price! Indirect effects of emotions and moderation effects of skepticism explain reduced use intentions towards participative pricing models. PLoS ONE 18(2): e0275499. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0275499 Editor: Iván Barreda-Tarrazona, Universitat Jaume I, SPAIN Received: March 9, 2022 Accepted: September 16, 2022 Published: February 14, 2023 Copyright: © 2023 Wittstock-Lang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting Information files. Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. ☯ These authors contributed equally to this work. * , Abstract Participative pricing models (i.e., auction, reverse auction, pay-what-you-want) have grown in importance compared to classical, non-participative pricing models (i.e., fixed price, discount). This study examined (1) relative use intentions regarding different (non-) participative pricing models, (2) the emotional responses triggered by the pricing models and influencing consumers’ use intentions, and (3) the moderating role of individual skepticism in this context. A between-subjects experiment (N = 505) with five groups, manipulating participative (auction, reverse auction, and pay-what-you-want) and non-participative (fixed price and discount) pricing models, detected reduced use intentions towards participative compared to non-participative pricing models. Even though participative pricing models induced higher levels of positive as well as negative emotions, the effects via positive emotions (promoting use intentions) were weaker than the effects via negative emotions (mitigating use intentions). Skepticism towards participative pricing models enhanced negative emotions and decreased positive emotions. Practical applications should rely on enhancing positive emotions while simultaneously reducing negative emotions, as they exert independent effects. Skepticism of potential users should be mitigated in the early stages of the customer relationship, e.g., via trustworthiness triggers. Introduction Imagine you are looking for a PC game to play and you come across the game “theHunter: Call of the Wild”. The atmospheric open world of the game is exactly what you were looking for. To purchase the game you have three options. The Humble Bundle platform (www. humblebundle.com) offers this game via pay-what-you-want. Simultaneously, you can buy the same game at a fixed price (www.mmoga.net) or a discount (www.instant-gaming.com). Which of these options are you going to choose? Although hypothetical in this case, consumers oftentimes have to choose between different pricing models. Thus, understanding the factors PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275499 February 14, 2023 1 / 23 PLOS ONE Emotions and skepticism explain reduced use intentions toward participative pricing models influencing consumer reactions towards different pricing models is important for managers and sellers in deciding which of these pricing models they will offer. Digitalization and the increased use of participative (or sometimes also called interactive) pricing models on the internet are opening up new opportunities for designing purchase settings. Innovative pricing models such as reverse auctions or pay-what-you-want (PWYW) are increasingly being offered for services or products online. The success of portals such as eBay shows that buyers and sellers of new and used items are conducting auction-based business profitably on the internet. Customers on platforms such as MyHammer use reverse auctions to purchase service offers. Providers such as Humble Bundle use the internet to successfully offer pay-what-you-want pricing models for software. The internet allows buyers and sellers to quickly exchange, compare and shape price information. Even though participative pricing models are conceivable in physical market settings as well, the virtual setting of the digital economy is particularly suitable for them because a very large number of users can be addressed simultaneously and the number of online purchases is increasing. Thus, it seems reasonable to predict the growing applications of these pricing models along with the generally increasing digitalization of consumer settings. This research aims to elucidate potential affective and attitudinal determinants of customers having to choose between these pricing models. There are two different use case scenarios in which the choice between different pricing models can emerge for the customer in real-world consumer settings. First, sometimes customers can choose between different pricing models for the same product within the same retailer. For example, on eBay, a mobile phone is offered at a fixed price (to buy immediately) or (possibly at a lower price) via an auction. Another example is software trainings on Neowin Deals (www.deals.neowin.net), which are offered on the same purchase channel for a fixed price ($17.93) or via pay-what-you-want. Thus, within the same channel or retailer, a customer can choose between different pricing options for the same product. Here, the use case of the customer having to choose between different pricing models for the same offer emerges on the side of the provider. A second way a use case can emerge is on the customer’s side when they are provided with different pricing models via different channels for the same product. An example of this would be the above-mentioned game “theHunter: Call of the Wild”. The game is offered via paywhat-you-want (www.humblebundle.com), or at a fixed price (www.mmoga.net) or a discount (www.instant-gaming.com). Another example: The Yummy Organics Company (www. yummy-organics.de) offers shoppers the option to purchase a product via pay-what-you-want. The same product can be purchased from Amazon (www.amazon.de) at a fixed price. In examples like these, the use case emerges on the consumer’s side, who can choose to obtain the same product via different pricing models offered by different providers. What variables are we (...truncated)