Getting Price Right: The Behavioral Economics of Profitable Pricing

Winner, 2022 Leonard L. Berry Marketing Book Award, American Marketing Association

How do leaders, managers, and proprietors go about the essential task of setting prices? What biases enter into this process, and why? How can a business debias its price setting to become more productive, strategic, and profitable?

Combining perceptive insights from behavioral economics with leading-edge ideas on price management, this book offers a new approach to pricing. Gerald Smith demonstrates why understanding, reframing, and refining everyday pricing processes―a firm’s or manager’s pricing orientation―results in a better long-term pricing strategy. He explores how pricing actually happens in practice and shows how to identify and remove the psychological blinders that cause suboptimal decisions and policies. Smith details how to improve pricing orientation by combining the soft behavioral skills that intuitively shape and refine pricing practice with the hard analytic skills that guide and structure pricing strategy. The result is more rational and more profitable pricing―with respect to not only revenue and profitability but also employee productivity and customer satisfaction.

Offering an accessible and actionable model, Getting Price Right is the first book to apply behavioral economics to managerial price setting. It is a must-read for corporate business leaders, thought leaders, and professionals interested in advances in pricing and for managers, entrepreneurs, proprietors, and small and midsize business owners whose everyday work involves pricing.