Pricing of the Knowledge-Based Services : Insight from the Environmental Sciences

Most of the pricing schemes applied in the service sector are devoted to "service" commodities like airplane seats or hotel rooms. These techniques called dynamic pricing exploit the fact that service commodities are sufficiently standardized. Compared to the production of goods, services will typically display a high degree of most of the 4 IHIP dimensions. The intangibility and heterogeneity of knowledge-based services make that automated pricing schemes are not easy to model. In our recent research, we are exploring different kinds of pricing schemes that could be used to determine a "fair" price taking into account the point of views of providers and consumers of knowledge-based services. We adopt a multidisciplinary approach essentially grounded on the environmental sciences