Pay what you want (PWYW) is a new participative pricing mechanism in which consumers have maximum control over the price they pay. Previous research has suggested that participative pricing increases consumers' intent to purchase. However, sellers using PWYW face the risk that consumers will exploit their control and pay nothing at all or a price below the seller's costs. In three field studies, the authors find that prices paid are significantly greater than zero. They analyze factors that influence prices paid and show that PWYW can even lead to an increase in seller revenues.

A key issue for marketers resulting from the dramatic rise of social media is how it can be leveraged to generate value for firms. Whereas the importance of social media for brand management and customer relationship management is widely recognized, it is unclear whether social media can also help companies market and sell products. Extant discussions of social commerce present a variety of perspectives, but the core issue remains unresolved. This paper aims to make two contributions. First, to address the lack of clarity in the literature regarding the meaning and domain of social commerce, the paper offers a definition stemming from important research streams in marketing. This definition allows for both a broad (covering all steps of the consumer decision process) and a narrow (focusing on the purchase act itself) construal of social commerce. Second, we build on this definition and develop a contingency framework for assessing the marketing potential that social commerce has to offer to firms. Implications for researchers and managers, based on the proposed definition and framework, are also discussed.

Pay what you want (PWYW) is a new participative pricing mechanism in which consumers have maximum control over the price they pay. Previous research has suggested that participative pricing increases consumers' intent to purchase. However, sellers using PWYW face the risk that consumers will exploit their control and pay nothing at all or a price below the seller's costs. In three field studies, the authors find that prices paid are significantly greater than zero. They analyze factors that influence prices paid and show that PWYW can even lead to an increase in seller revenues.

The proliferation of interconnectivity and interactivity through Internet-based technologies enables new forms of support for new product development. This paper analyzes idea markets, which use widely distributed knowledge, the power of markets, and the Internet to support the crucial initial tasks of the new product development process, including the sourcing, filtering, and evaluation of new product ideas. Idea markets employ virtual stocks to represent new product ideas and allow participants to suggest and trade new product ideas in a virtual marketplace. This paper empirically explores the performance of idea markets in a real-world field study at a large, high-tech business-tobusiness company that includes more than 500 participants from 17 countries and features various idea sourcing tasks. The results indicate that idea markets are a feasible and promising method to support the fuzzy front end of the new product development process. Idea markets offer a platform and formal process to capture, select, and distribute ideas in an organization, which motivates employees to communicate their ideas to management. By effectively sourcing and contemporaneously filtering, idea markets help reduce the number of ideas brought to management's attention to those that seem worthy of further consideration. Because idea markets also have the ability to source many ideas, they can increase efficiency at the fuzzy front end of the new product development process.

T he application of Internet-based virtual stock markets (VSMs) is an additional approach that can be used to predict short-and medium-term market developments. The basic concept involves bringing a group of participants together via the Internet and allowing them to trade shares of virtual stocks. These stocks represent a bet on the outcome of future market situations, and their value depends on the realization of these market situations. In this process, a VSM elicits and aggregates the assessments of its participants concerning future market developments. The aim of this article is to evaluate the potential use and the different design possibilities as well as the forecast accuracy and performance of VSMs compared to expert predictions for their application to business forecasting. After introducing the basic idea of using VSMs for business forecasting, we discuss the different design possibilities for such VSMs. In three real-world applications, we analyze the feasibility and forecast accuracy of VSMs, compare the performance of VSMs to expert predictions, and propose a new validity test for VSM forecasts. Finally, we draw conclusions and provide suggestions for future research.