THE EFFECTS OF DISCOUNT PRICING AND BUNDLING ON THE SALES OF GAME AS A SERVICE: AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION

摘要

Although many prior studies have discussed the effect of discount pricing and product bundling on sales, few investigated the effect on Game as a Service (GaaS) applications, which has been rapidly growing in the IT industry. We investigate the effect by adopting large empirical market data, including 112,858 observations of 5,570 GaaS applications in the theoretical perspective of perceived value, price fairness, expected utility, and competitive intensity. We found that both discount pricing and bundling have positive effects on the daily sales of the applications. Specifically, discount rate and the amount of discounted price (i.e., reduced price) have positive relationships with the sales increase, while the effect of discount pricing decreases as more discount deals are available in the market. However, we did not find a significant interaction effect of bundling on the relationship between discount rate and the sales increase.