Examining the application of behavioral price research in business-to-business markets

Business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) markets differ in many ways as documented in the contemporary marketing literature. However, many behavioral characteristics of human beings – particularly those related to judgment and decision-making – are present across diverse contexts. From this insight, we derive a proposition: many behavioral price concepts developed in the past B2C behavioral price research may be applicable in B2B context as well. The objective of this paper is to examine this proposition through analyzing the existing evidence on five important behavioral price concepts: reference price, price thresholds, acceptable price range, price as an indicator of quality, and the price–perceived value model. At a more general level, the objective of this paper is to demonstrate the importance of recognizing how buyers' responses to prices and price information differ from the traditional assumptions about such behaviors in B2B marketing literature.