Giving Customers Decision Rights: A Field Study of Pay‐What‐You‐Want Pricing at a Performing Arts Theater*
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT We conduct a field study at a performing arts theater offering pay‐what‐you‐want (PWYW) pricing as one of several pricing options to purchase tickets. While offering PWYW in this setting introduces multiple layers of self‐selection, we find PWYW attendees are not a homogeneous group. Rather, attendees have distinct identities that vary in the extent to which they view PWYW as an economic transaction or a social exchange. We also find the effect of PWYW on subsequent consumption behavior is asymmetric. PWYW attendees do not subsequently become season subscribers. However, when the PWYW option was offered for a different performance, some season subscribers to that performance canceled their season ticket subscriptions with plans to use PWYW in the future, resulting in potentially lost revenues and a smaller season subscriber base. Thus, using PWYW as part of multiple pricing strategy may be especially costly when firms rely on dedicated patronage by consumers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".