Pricing in a service sector context: accounting and marketing logics in the hotel industry

The paper analyses hotel room pricing via an application of institutional economic theory. The institutional framework considers the impact of accounting and marketing templates that help hotel managers make sense of complex pricing decisions. From an institutional perspective, the spread and implementation of these templates is influenced by specific historical factors and may be subject to path dependency. The institutional theory is applied to a case study using a pragmatic constructivist methodology. The case site revealed that whilst long run cost structures are important in locating the market niche of the business and that hotels use conventional cost control techniques, costs play relatively little role in price determination with a dominant role for marketing templates that concentrate on revenue management. The study suggests how the synthesis between institutional economics and pragmatic constructivism offers a research framework that could be replicated in further studies.