Sales Force Behavior, Pricing Information, and Pricing Decisions

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Elmaghraby, Wedad; Jank, Wolfgang; Zhang, Shu; Karaesmen, Itir Z.
• 署名单位: University System of Maryland; University of Maryland College Park; State University System of Florida; University of South Florida; American University
• 刊物名称: M&SOM-MANUFACTURING & SERVICE OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1523-4614
• DOI: 10.1287/msom.2015.0537
• 发表日期: 2015
• 页码: 495-510
• 关键词: B2B; pricing; decision making; SALES FORCE; regression; logit model; two-stage model

摘要

This paper focuses on salespeople behavior in business-to-business transactions. The paper investigates how salespeople use the information provided to them to set prices; of particular interest is how salespeople use price recommendations from a decision support tool. The investigation builds reduced-form models and tests them on a data set obtained by a grocery products distributor. The analysis shows that salespeople's decisions are explained well by a two-stage decision model whereby salespeople make an initial decision on whether or not to change the price (a binary decision) and then decide on the magnitude of change (a continuous response). We find that salespeople in our data set do not blindly adopt the recommended price change generated by the pricing tool. Rather, our two-stage model allows for us to uncover a nuanced association between the recommended price and the actual price change by identifying customer-specific and salesperson-specific market factors that moderate the influence of price recommendations.