Charitable giving, suggestion, and learning from others: Pay-What-You-Want experiments at a coffee shop

We examine consumer behavior under Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW) pricing by conducting a series of field experiments that implemented different pricing schemes at a coffee shop: PWYW, PWYW with charitable giving, PWYW with charitable giving and a suggested price, and for comparison a regular fixed price group and a fixed price with giving group. We find that the PWYW scheme, when combined with charitable giving and a suggested price, yields net revenue as large as that under the fixed price scheme. We also find that consumers under PWYW with charitable giving are responsive to a suggested price and seek to learn from others. (c) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.