The Role of Altruistic and Egoistic Motivations in Pay What you Want Situations
Recent literature in marketing has identified participative pricing concepts as a profitable strategy for service oriented business areas (Spann et al. 2004; Spann and Tellis 2006; Kim et al. 2009; Kim et al. 2010a and Kim et al. 2010b). Shifting the cont
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y can also lead to negative aversive emotions experienced by the observing person. As a result, the individual is motivated to eliminate the source of his negative emotions (aversive-arousal reduction hypothesis) and therefore will have the intention to help (Batson 1991). Furthermore, egoistic motivations to help can emerge from the desire to maintain a positive self-image as well a positive image towards society. On the one hand, individuals know that they will feel ashamed, guilty and blamed if they refuse to help. On the other hand, they will feel appraisable, proud and honorable if they do help. Furthermore, people learned through socialization that punishments and rewards are stronger when they are feeling empathy for the person in need (Batson et al. 1988). Thus, the higher the empathy for the vendor, the more customers have egoistic motivations to avoid negative feelings and try to gain rewards (H4). From Batson’s theories, empathy can be understood from a cognitive and an affective perspective. The pure term “empathy” usually refers to affective empathy, which is defined as the emotional response to the other person’s state (Eisenberg and Strayer 1987; Hoffman 2000). Cognitive empathy represents an antecedent of these emotional responses and is defined as the perception of another person’s inner state, also called perspective-taking (Eisenberg 1991; Oswald 1996; Batson et al. 1997). The perception-action model by Preston and de Wall (2002) provides an explication for this causal connection. In accordance with the model, taking the perspective of an object activates brain regions that are congruent with the object’s perceived situation and evokes feelings that are similar to the object’s feelings. As the authors stress that the object can be a person, animal or an organization we can conclude that the stronger a customer is taking the perspective of a vendor the higher his/her empathy will be (H5). In general, we expect support for all hypotheses in both offline and online environments. However, negative feelings and personal rewards are perceived stronger when another person is present during the helping process. Emotions like pride or shame are related to the self-image and should therefore increase in the presence of others (Batson et al. 1988). Altruistic motivations, on the other hand, do not depend on the presence of a third person, as they do not address personal benefits. Consequently, egoistic motivations should exert a stronger influence on the price paid in offline environments than in online environments (H6). METHOD AND RESULTS To test the postulated hypotheses, we conducted two studies, investigating PWYW settings in an offline environment and an online environment. Two online surveys based on a virtual PWYW situation resulted in 268 and 272 completed questionnaires. Survey A asked respondents to indicate a price they were willing to pay in a classical offline situation with personal contact to the vendor (restaurant visit). Survey B asked respondents to indicate a price they were willing to pay
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