The impact of market structure on pricing objectives of service firms

The purpose of this research paper is to explore the pricing objectives that service companies pursue to set their prices and to examine the impact of market structure. An extensive review of the literature revealed the complete lack of any previous work aiming to empirically investigate the impact of market structure on the company's pricing behavior and pricing objectives. Thus, the value of the paper lies in the fact that it presents the first attempt to empirically examine this issue from a marketing perspective. In order to achieve research objectives, data were collected from 170 companies operating in six different services sectors in Greece through personal interviews. The findings of the study show that the companies seem to follow a hierarchy of pricing objectives where their main focus is on the maintenance of the existing customers and the attraction of new ones, in order to ensure their long‐term position in the market without, however, disregarding financial considerations.