So Last Century! — It’s Time to End the Tyranny of Set Prices
We think we know what a price is, but new kinds of markets require new kinds of prices. A price has a function, and that function has changed.
We recognize that electronic markets and digital products have created a new age, but we seem to not recognize that these markets and products need a radically new approach to pricing. FairPay is a new concept of what a price is for these new markets.
Expanding on ideas on the Harvard Business Review Blog, Marco Bertini and I have co-authored an article, “A Novel Architecture to Monetize Digital Goods,” that has been submitted to a leading management journal for publication.
Conventional thinking about prices is blinded by a mind-set that we all grew up with and take for granted — but that is actually a historical oddity. As we observe in the article:
Throughout most of the history of commerce, price was the outcome of a negotiation between individual sellers and buyers. Different buyers achieved different prices depending on their current situation, needs, and bargaining power. In other words, prices were very personal.
Starting in the 1850s, however, the shift to mass retail shoved this tradition aside. Shoppers no longer bought from individuals, but from organizations interested in standardization and scale. Indeed, the price tag gained popularity in the early 1860s with the arrival of the department store — John Wanamaker, the trailblazing American merchant and religious leader, opined that if everyone is equal before God, then everyone should also be equal before price. The company dictated terms, with prices set to maximize profit or some other objective and offered to the market on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.
Now that commerce is shifting back to personalization, it is interesting that one of its central ingredients, price, lags behind. Businesspeople appreciate that prices should be fitted to people’s personal valuations as they once were, but there is no real agreement on how this comes about.
Our suggestion seeks to undo the tyranny of fixed prices while retaining the efficiency inherent to institutionalized commerce…
Specifics of how and why to do that are explained in the article (preliminary version online at SSRN). Additional background is in other posts on this blog.
To be clear, our answer is not to try to somehow go backward to automate traditional negotiation. Instead we need to go forward with new ways to build relationships based on human values in a world of electronic markets and digital experiences. What we need is a totally new concept of what a price is, how it is arrived at, and why.
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The shift of commerce to the digital domain has forced many organizations to rethink their attitude to value creation, at times backtracking to the very question of what “value” actually means. Electronic commerce facilitates and thrives on social interaction, yet the way companies convert digital anything into cash they can bank seems to be stuck in time, obeying rules and practices that may have worked for physical goods but make far less sense today. We believe that earning revenue in the digital age needs a fresh approach. This short article seeks to lay the foundations for such an approach and proposes FairPay as one viable alternative.
