Empathic cultural consumers: Pay what you want in the theater

• Published date: 01 December 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joca.12327
• Author: Francisco J. León‐Medina,Jordi Tena‐Sánchez,José A. Noguera
• Date: 01 December 2020

ARTICLE

Empathic cultural consumers: Pay what you

want in the theater

Jordi Tena-Sánchez

1

| Francisco J. León-Medina

2

|

José A. Noguera

1

1

Department of Sociology, Universitat

Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona,

Spain

2

Department of Sociology and

Communication Sciences, Universidade

da Coruña, Coruña, Spain

Correspondence

Jordi Tena-Sánchez, Universitat

Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona,

Spain.

Email: jordi.tena@uab.cat

Funding information

Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación,

Grant/Award Numbers:

PID2019-104801RB-I00,

PID2019-107589GB-I00

Abstract

Pay what you want (PWYW) is an increasingly popular

sales strategy in which consumers voluntarily decide

how much to pay for a product or service. PWYW has

often been described as an exercise in the “empathy

economy,”where consumers' payment choices might be

seen as empowered expressions of their tastes and pref-

erences, and sellers have a stronger incentive for empa-

thizing with them. Beyond their economic interest,

PWYW experiences also deserve significant attention in

the social sciences given that they challenge several key

assumptions of rational choice and neoclassical eco-

nomic theory, as well as conventional consumer behav-

ior and pricing theories. This paper analyzes three plays

performed at the Beckett Theater in Barcelona using

PWYW with very profitable outcomes. Our analysis

shows that socio-psychological factors, such as payments

attributed to others and satisfaction with the play, are

the best predictors of customer payments.

KEYWORDS

consumer behavior, consumer elective pricing, pricing theories

1|INTRODUCTION

In 2013, a new payment system was used for three plays that were performed in the Beckett

Room, a small theater in Barcelona (Si existeix encara no ho he trobat, Monsieur Apeine quiere

Received: 11 July 2019 Revised: 9 June 2020 Accepted: 18 June 2020

DOI: 10.1111/joca.12327

© 2020 American Council on Consumer Interests

J Consum Aff. 2020;54:1213–1245. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/joca 1213

hacer amigos and Àlies Gospodin). Each member of the public attended without having to pay

an entrance fee and could decide how much she wanted to pay when leaving the theater. This

pricing system is usually known as “pay what you want”(PWYW hereafter).

1

PWYW is an

innovative pricing strategy in which consumers voluntarily decide how much they want to pay

for a product or service, including the possibility of paying nothing. Although this strategy is

not nearly as common as the traditional fixed price system, it has become increasingly popular

in recent years and PWYW experiences have proliferated, especially in the culture and leisure

markets. Examples of PWYW experiences that have attracted scholarly interest include the

online music sales practices of the rock band Radiohead and the Magnatune record label

(Regner and Barría, 2009; Regner, 2015); Google Answers (Rafaeli et al., 2007; Regner, 2014);

open access publishing (Spann et al., 2017); sales campaigns by hotels and travel agencies

(Gautier and Van der Klaauw, 2012; León-Medina et al., 2012); photo sales in amusement parks

and tourist tour boats (Gneezy et al., 2010; Gneezy et al., 2012); bookstores (Gravert, 2017); sales

of digital creations (Jung et al., 2014); consumption in certain restaurants, cafes and doughnut

shops (Riener, 2008; Kim et al., 2009; Kim et al., 2010; Gneezy et al., 2012; Riener and

Traxler, 2012; Jung et al., 2014; Jung et al., 2017; Viglia et al., 2019), supermarkets (Jung

et al., 2017) and tickets in certain cultural venues such as cinemas (Kim et al., 2009) and

museums (Jung et al., 2014).

2

The PWYW system is attractive to many people who see it as an innovative, non-

conventional strategy (Kim et al., 2009). Some people have even considered PWYW experiences

as a potential alternative to the capitalist consumption system.

3

In this line, as we will see, the

actors of one of the plays analyzed here refer to the performance as an exercise in the “empathy

economy”: under this pricing system, consumers' payment choices might be seen as expressions

of how much they enjoy or value a particular product, or how much they empathize or identify

with the creators, artists, or producers. On the other hand, sellers have a stronger incentive for

empathizing with consumers' tastes and preferences. In sum, PWYW may favor consumers'

interests in the marketplace because, by allowing them to decide on the price of the product, it

fosters their autonomy and contributes to empowering them.

4

The main objective of this study is to identify the factors that predict audience payment

decisions in this particular case of PWYW in Spain, and to discuss plausible explanatory mecha-

nisms for them. It is worth noting that the three plays analyzed in this article are among the

most profitable of all the PWYW experiences studied in the specialized literature. As in many

other countries, PWYW experiences have proliferated in recent years in Spain. But, unlike what

happened in those other countries, they have attracted very little academic attention, except for

our previous study (León-Medina et al., 2012). In that first study, we analyzed a very different

experience (holiday packages offered by the Atrápalo online travel agency) with diametrically

opposed results: the Atrápalo PWYW experience was far from profitable because it was framed

in a way that crowded out consumers' pro-social motivations and trust in the firm's honesty,

and allowed interpreting PWYW as a bargain. In contrast, in the Becket theater experience we

analyze in this article, a different empathic frame as well as the presence of face-to-face interac-

tion and social influence may have produced a different outcome. In this regard, the present

work provides evidence of how some contextual factors in the implementation of PWYW may

affect consumers' behavior and hence the experience's profitability. A case-study approach is

relevant to the topic because the scarce works on PWYW from a cross-country approach have

found significant differences between countries (see Bettray et al., 2017; Dorn and

Suessmair, 2017). Therefore, the article contributes to the literature on PWYW and non-

conventional pricing strategies by clarifying the role of different motivations in consumers'

1214 TENA-SÁNCHEZ ET AL.

economic decisions, and by identifying contextual factors that trigger or inhibit non-selfish

behavior. This is important because conventional economic theory has traditionally relied on

the behavioral assumption of consumers' selfish rationality.

Finally, from the viewpoint of consumers' interests, the article also aims to contribute to the

better design of pricing strategies that empower consumers and make their preferences and

tastes more transparent and autonomous. PWYW still generates deep skepticism as a business

strategy and its scientific study remains on the margins of the behavioral disciplines. This is far

from optimal, since the study of PWYW experiences in the field may permit integrating theoret-

ical lessons and evidence from disciplines such as sociology, economic psychology, behavioral

economics, and marketing. However, there are still few clearly successful cases and the existing

studies are not conclusive. From an applied, commercial point of view, knowledge of the factors

associated with successful PWYW experiences would allow the assessment of radically different

pricing strategies based on eliciting consumers' prosocial motivations and establishing relations

of trust and reciprocity between sellers and buyers. If this knowledge is conveniently spread, it

may help firms and sellers to make more informed decisions when designing their pricing strat-

egies and PWYW campaigns, since it would provide them a catalogue of good practices that

clarifies when PWYW is an adequate strategy, how to design PWYW marketing campaigns, the

typical mistakes to avoid, what type of products and services fit PWYW better, and so on.

The article is organized as follows. An overview of the literature on PWYW experiences is

provided in the next section. This is followed by a detailed description of the three cases under

study. The data and methodology used and the results obtained are then presented. Different

explanations for the results are discussed. Finally, some concluding remarks are made.

2|EXPLANATORY FACTORS OF THE OUTCOMES OF

PWYW EXPERIENCES: AN OVERVIEW

The proliferation of PWYW experiences poses several challenges and intriguing questions for

conventional consumer behavior and pricing theories in mainstream economics and marketing

science. Traditional models of economic behavior have drawn on rational choice theory, which

assumes that individual actors make decisions with the aim of maximizing their utility func-

tions, understood as consistent and stable preference orderings among states of the world. Con-

ventional economic models have also assumed that individual preference ordering in economic

contexts is self-interested. When applied to consumer behavior, this framework implies, among

other things, that consumers will buy those goods and services that maximize their utility given

their opportunities in terms of purchasing power and available products. Rational consumers

will make efficient decisions and therefore, ceteris paribus, they should choose the lowest price

available for goods of a similar quality. When applied to pricing behavior by firms or sellers,

conventional models assume that maximizing profits implies that, in usual market conditions,

the final price is established by the seller, and is equal for all consumers.

Nonetheless, the majority of customers usually pay something in PWYW experiences,

although the average payment per unit/customer is generally lower than the regular fixed mar-

ket price for the good or service provided (Gerpott, 2016, 587). Despite this, most of the experi-

ences end up being financially profitable for the firm even if the average payment is lower than

the regular fixed market price.

5

Sometimes, the campaign can attract a larger number of clients,

which compensates for lower average payments. On other occasions, profits can be gained by

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