Exploring the Pay-What-You-Want payment motivation

Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW) pricing is becoming increasingly popular in real-world applications, especially for cultural services and digital goods. Yet very little is known about the factors related to the customers' motivation of paying (e.g., fairness, getting a bargain). This research explores the relevance, the relative importance of these factors in PWYW contexts, and their impact on customers' payments. Five empirical studies provide a basis for a conceptual framework of PWYW pricing. Four of these studies find (in line with the prior literature) the importance and the relevance of fairness, customer satisfaction, and income. Furthermore, avoiding feelings of guilt is found to be a relevant and relatively important factor that also drives PWYW payments. This has so far not been acknowledged in the literature. In the fifth study, textual cues are applied to examine the manageability of the factors. Their presence does not affect PWYW payments in most cases.