Price gouging involves charging excessive prices during emergencies or high-demand situations. While it may lead to higher profits and market dominance, it poses challenges such as reputation damage and legal consequences due to its exploitative nature.
Table of Contents
Characteristics:
Excessive Pricing: Charging unreasonably high prices for goods or services.
Demand Surge: Exploiting sudden increase in demand to maximize profits.
Supply Constraints: Taking advantage of limited supply to raise prices.
Opportunistic Behavior: Taking advantage of emergencies or crises to increase prices.
Use Cases:
Natural Disasters: During disasters, essential goods prices may skyrocket.
Health Emergencies: Medical supplies’ prices may surge during health crises.
Scarce Resources: Goods with limited availability may face excessive pricing.
Examples:
Bottled Water: Selling bottled water at exorbitant prices during a disaster.
Face Masks: Raising face masks’ prices significantly during a pandemic.
Fuel Prices: Price surge in fuel during supply disruptions.
Benefits:
Higher Profits: Opportunity to maximize profits in high-demand situations.
Market Dominance: Gaining market dominance by exploiting supply constraints.
Challenges:
Reputation Damage: Negative impact on brand reputation and public trust.
Legal Consequences: Potential legal actions and regulations against price gouging.
Key Highlights
Excessive Pricing: Price gouging involves charging unreasonably high prices for goods or services during emergencies, crises, or situations of high demand.
Demand Surge: It takes advantage of sudden spikes in demand to maximize profits by increasing prices significantly.
Supply Constraints: Price gouging capitalizes on limited supply, where sellers can exploit scarcity to inflate prices.
Opportunistic Behavior: Price gouging is opportunistic in nature, as it aims to capitalize on emergencies or crises to generate higher profits.
Use Cases: Price gouging scenarios include instances like natural disasters, health emergencies (e.g., pandemics), and situations where essential goods become scarce.
Examples: Examples of price gouging include selling bottled water at exorbitant prices during disasters, raising face mask prices significantly during a pandemic, and increasing fuel prices due to supply disruptions.
Benefits: Price gouging may result in higher profits for businesses during times of high demand, and it can contribute to gaining market dominance through supply-constrained situations.
Challenges: Engaging in price gouging can damage a company’s reputation by negatively impacting brand image and public trust. Moreover, legal consequences can arise, including potential legal actions and regulations against exploitative pricing practices.
Revenue model patterns are a way for companies to monetize their business models. A revenuemodel pattern is a crucial building block of a business model because it informs how the company will generate short-term financial resources to invest back into the business. Thus, the way a company makes money will also influence its overall businessmodel.
A pricingstrategy or model helps companies find the pricing formula in fit with their business models. Thus aligning the customer needs with the product type while trying to enable profitability for the company. A good pricingstrategy aligns the customer with the company’s long term financial sustainability to build a solid businessmodel.
Price sensitivity can be explained using the price elasticity of demand, a concept in economics that measures the variation in product demand as the price of the product itself varies. In consumer behavior, price sensitivity describes and measures fluctuations in product demand as the price of that product changes.
A price ceiling is a price control or limit on how high a price can be charged for a product, service, or commodity. Price ceilings are limits imposed on the price of a product, service, or commodity to protect consumers from prohibitively expensive items. These limits are usually imposed by the government but can also be set in the resale price maintenance (RPM) agreement between a product manufacturer and its distributors.
Price elasticity measures the responsiveness of the quantity demanded or supplied of a good to a change in its price. It can be described as elastic, where consumers are responsive to price changes, or inelastic, where consumers are less responsive to price changes. Price elasticity, therefore, is a measure of how consumers react to the price of products and services.
In Economics, Economies of Scale is a theory for which, as companies grow, they gain cost advantages. More precisely, companies manage to benefit from these cost advantages as they grow, due to increased efficiency in production. Thus, as companies scale and increase production, a subsequent decrease in the costs associated with it will help the organizationscale further.
In Economics, a Diseconomy of Scale happens when a company has grown so large that its costs per unit will start to increase. Thus, losing the benefits of scale. That can happen due to several factors arising as a company scales. From coordination issues to management inefficiencies and lack of proper communication flows.
A network effect is a phenomenon in which as more people or users join a platform, the more the value of the service offered by the platform improves for those joining afterward.
Price skimming is primarily used to maximize profits when a new product or service is released. Price skimming is a productpricingstrategy where a company charges the highest initial price a customer is willing to pay and then lowers the price over time.
Productized services are services that are sold with clearly defined parameters and pricing. In short, that is about taking any product and transforming it into a service. This trend has been strong as the subscription-based economy developed.
Menu costs describe any cost that a business must absorb when it decides to change its prices. The term itself references restaurants that must incur the cost of reprinting their menus every time they want to increase the price of an item. In an economic context, menu costs are expenses that are incurred whenever a business decides to change its prices.
A price floor is a control placed on a good, service, or commodity to stop its price from falling below a certain limit. Therefore, a price floor is the lowest legal price a good, service, or commodity can sell for in the market. One of the best-known examples of a price floor is the minimum wage, a control set by the government to ensure employees receive an income that affords them a basic standard of living.
Predatory pricing is the act of setting prices low to eliminate competition. Industry dominant firms use predatory pricing to undercut the prices of their competitors to the point where they are making a loss in the short term. Predatory prices help incumbents keep a monopolistic position, by forcing new entrants out of the market.
A price ceiling is a price control or limit on how high a price can be charged for a product, service, or commodity. Price ceilings are limits imposed on the price of a product, service, or commodity to protect consumers from prohibitively expensive items. These limits are usually imposed by the government but can also be set in the resale price maintenance (RPM) agreement between a product manufacturer and its distributors.
The bye-now effect describes the tendency for consumers to think of the word “buy” when they read the word “bye”. In a study that tracked diners at a name-your-own-price restaurant, each diner was asked to read one of two phrases before ordering their meal. The first phrase, “so long”, resulted in diners paying an average of $32 per meal. But when diners recited the phrase “bye bye” before ordering, the average price per meal rose to $45.
The anchoring effect describes the human tendency to rely on an initial piece of information (the “anchor”) to make subsequent judgments or decisions. Price anchoring, then, is the process of establishing a price point that customers can reference when making a buying decision.
A price maker is a player who sets the price, independently from what the market does. The price setter is the firm with the influence, market power, and differentiation to be able to set the price for the whole market, thus charging more and yet still driving substantial sales without losing market shares.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
