eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

PURPOSE OF THE STUDY The purpose of this constructive case study is to build a cost-based pricing model to a case company and assess its applicability both to the industry in question and across different contexts. The study also shows how a company in practice considers the relevancy of costs for pricing decisions and thus takes part in a prolonged discussion of the differences of the theory and practice in the field of pricing.

DATA The data used in the theoretical part of this study consists primarily of costing and pricing related academic literature from both management accounting and economics disciplines. The empirical part of the study uses the case company’s internal material,interviews, informal discussions and reporting and statistic systems’ data. The data was gathered in 2011-2012.

RESULTS Findings of the study introduce the cost-based pricing construction. The pricing model that is built for a case company that operates in a complex two-sided market differs from previous models by its usage of cost data that is partly based on statistics and probability calculus. Due to the deviant context of the case company a wider applicability of the pricing model as such may be difficult.

The study also shows that the case company applies full-costing that is highly criticized by the proponents of conventional pricing theory. The theory-practice gap is wide in the field of pricing and the findings of the case study indicate a few reasons for acting against the conventional wisdom. These reasons consists e.g. of the usage of accounting systems as the prime providers for cost information, the concern in the case company that all cost will be covered by pricing and the impracticality of marginalistic pricing.