Companies frequently rely on pricing algorithms to automate their price-setting in online markets; thereby, algorithmic dynamic pricing (ADP) has become a common pricing practice in the digital era, with retailers regularly tweaking products’ prices in their online shops. On Amazon.com alone, millions of price changes occur within a day, which corresponds to a price change approximately every ten minutes for each product. Yet, so far, the effects of such pricing algorithms on consumers are unclear. Since ascertaining consumer reactions is essential for retailers’ pricing strategies and retailers need to know how to mitigate negative reactions, our focal research questions are: How do consumers respond to ADP? How can retailers mitigate negative consumer reactions to ADP?
This research addresses financial market communication of marketing information (i.e., information related to firms’ organic growth opportunities) through depth interviews (Study 1) and quantitative data on conference calls and stock market reactions (Study 2). The investigation (1) reveals that marketing, despite high potential relevance for financial markets, often plays only a marginal role in firms’ financial market communication and (2) develops a framework for effectively communicating marketing to financial markets.