Making payment choices

Abstract

A lack of a clear rationale regarding the pricing of online information resources is one of the defining characteristics of the information industry, which has never managed to find its way towards a sensible pricing approach other than by guesswork or by observing the searching behaviour of users. A major problem in information services’ pricing is the nebulous nature of information value and the way in which the value of information changes according to time and context; a problem that is compounded by the lack of a clear approach by end users to the decision whether to use free information or pay for access to premium information sources, especially information available on the web. The situational nature of information leads many users to turn to pay per view, unaware that in many cases their organization has an enterprise-wide contract in place. End users may turn to pay for view access based on the perception that the corporate library provides a service that is inappropriate or too slow. Users also apply intuitive criteria to assessing whether information should be paid for, based on models that are not strictly applicable but which seem so at a casual glance. Major factors determining the ‘fee or free’ decision concerning the use of information services include: factors influencing non-situational business information requirements; ‘push’ versus ‘pull’ approaches to information provision; the nature of free information and why it exists; hybrid pricing of information; the influence of advertising on pricing; fee-based information that looks like free information. Concludes with a discussion of when to turn to fee-based or free information sources based on the business characteristics set out in the article.