Track 1
Pricing Foundations & 101
First principles of pricing: the history of pricing as a discipline, demand curves, willingness to pay, cost pass-through, and the margin-versus-volume tradeoff.
Finding the Best Price
Explore the fundamental tradeoff between margin and volume. Adjust cost structure, demand parameters, and observe the optimal price on the contribution curve.
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Topics
How Pricing Became a Science
From ancient bazaars to algorithmic markets
Trace the evolution of pricing from antiquity through airline deregulation to modern algorithmic pricing, and discover why a 1% price improvement is the most powerful profit lever.
The Building Blocks of Pricing
Price waterfalls, approaches, and the analytics case
Explore the price waterfall — how twelve independent discounts compound to a 29% reduction — and compare cost-plus, market-based, and value-based pricing approaches.
What Customers Will Pay
Quantifying reference value and differentiation
Decompose a product's total economic value into the reference price plus differentiation value, and see how shifting individual value drivers changes the optimal price.
How Demand Responds to Price
Price-response functions and willingness to pay
Compare linear, logit, exponential, and constant-elasticity demand functions, and see how willingness-to-pay distributions generate demand curves.
Finding the Best Price
The margin-versus-volume tradeoff
Explore the fundamental tradeoff between margin and volume. Adjust cost structure, demand parameters, and observe the optimal price on the contribution curve.
Cost Pass-Through
How cost shocks reach consumers
Analyze how much of a cost increase reaches consumers, why pass-through depends on demand curvature rather than elasticity alone, and when firms over-shift costs beyond 100%.