Service pricing: An empirical investigation

The purpose of the present study is to explore the pricing objectives that service companies pursue along with the pricing information that they collect in order to price their services. Analyzing data from 170 companies operating in six different service sectors, the study concluded that the companies in our sample tend to follow a hierarchy of pricing objectives with a particular emphasis being placed on the companies’ customers. Furthermore, they tend to collect more than one type of information giving particular emphasis on the existing competitors’ prices. The study also revealed that the pricing objectives and the pricing information vary across the different service sectors and tend to interrelate.