The Conflict of Price Differentiation and Price Fairness

Master's Thesis from the year 2018 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 1,7, Cologne Business School Köln, language: English, abstract: The thesis describes the conflict of price differentiation strategies and the consumers' perception of price fairness in different manners. By that, the role of a price is explained in detail in the role of marketing, as well as it's role in behavioral economics regarding price fairness. Different examples, being a highly discussed topic in the current state of the art, are brought together to demonstrate the variety of this price policy. Uber, the haircutting industry as well as typical gender-based pricing or emergency situations represent crucial practices that are discussed in regard of moral and ethical limitations in terms of price fairness. Finally, the work aims to understand the limitations on price differentiation in the context of price fairness and tries to answer questions as: When is price differentiation acceptable for consumers and when should firms reconsider differential price strategies due to a perceived abuse of trust, anger or similar emotions of targeted customers? For that, an empirical social research is considered to bring first and secondary data together, and to enable the defintion of those limitations to become a little clearer.