Prof. Skander Essegaier
WHARTON

Topic : Pricing Strategy

Professor Skander Essegaier is an Assistant Professor of Marketing, with an appointment at the Stern School of Business, New York University. He was previously associated with Wharton School and University of Pennsylvania, and has also been a visiting faculty at INSEAD, France.

His expertise lies in two main areas (i) pricing and (ii) personalization. His research in the area of pric­ing focuses on the pricing of access services, where he is involved in studying the role of capacity and usage heterogeneity on the pricing of online information providers. He is currently working on the impact of capacity flexibility on the optimal pricing structure (per-session versus connect-time pricing) of online information providers. His research in the area of personalization focuses on inferring cus­tomers’ preferences for experiential products (such as books, movies, websites), where he is currently involved in studying the relative importance of various factors that impact customer’ experiences and their interactions. Now a days he is also working on a cross-website analysis of the factors that affect website visit duration and the various approaches to website design personalizing and their impact on individuals’ visit duration.

His work in these areas has been published in many journals including Marketing Science, Management Science, the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Applied Probability and the SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization. He also serves on the editorial board of Recherche et Applications en Marketing. Representative publications include “Website Visit Duration: A Cross-Domain Analysis,” forthcoming in Journal of Marketing Research (with Peter Danaher and Guy Mullarkey), “Pricing Ac­cess Services,” Marketing Science 21.2, Spring 2002 (with Sunil Gupta and Z. John Zhang), and “Internet Recommendation Systems,” Journal of Marketing Research 37.3, August 2000, (with Asim Ansari and Rajeev Kohli).

Professor Essegaier holds Ph.D. in Marketing from Columbia University, New York. a M.Sc. from the London School of Economics and a M.Sc. and B.Sc. from the Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l’Administration Economique, Paris.

Session Plans:

SESSION 1:

• Fundamental conceptual frameworks needed for formulating pricing strategies.
• Examination of key pricing concepts from a firm perspective as well as from a consumer perspective (pricing psychology).

SESSION 2:

• Fundamentals of price engineering
• Specific ideas that one can use to help firm improve its pricing strategies.
• Insights to successful pricing strategies in various industries and how to improve a firm’s pricing through a sophisticated pricing structure

SESSION 3:

• Discussion on a case study
• Examination on non-linear pricing strategies in the context of cellular service pricing and discussion on the interplay between pricing, target market selection, and a firm’s overall value proposition.