414. IJRM. Algorithmic Dynamic Pricing & Consumers Trust + Behavior.
June 4, 2026
Listen to full episode :
In this episode, Arnd Vomberg, Associate Professor of Marketing at HEC Paris, discusses how consumers respond to algorithmic dynamic pricing. His and his colleagues research, published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing, draws on real purchase data and controlled experiments to separate what practitioners assume from what consumers do.
Key items discussed include:
Why the fairness of a pricing process shapes how consumers judge the price itself, independent of whether the number is objectively reasonable
How repeated exposure to price volatility changes consumer reaction over time, and what that means for brands early in a dynamic pricing rollout
The gap between what a price guarantee costs a retailer and what it does to consumer trust, and why those two things are almost entirely disconnected
What distinguishes competitor-matching algorithms from demand-sensing ones in the consumer's mind, and why the distinction matters for perceived exploitation
Why price guarantees work, even if people rarely redeem them
Click here for the Research Article
The Up Next podcast’s access to this content is courtesy of the International Journal of Research in Marketing, an international, double-blind peer-reviewed journal for marketing academics and practitioners. IJRM aims to contribute to the marketing discipline by providing high-quality, original research which advances marketing knowledge and techniques. As marketers increasingly draw on diverse and sophisticated methods, IJRM‘s target audience is comprised of marketing scholars, practitioners (e.g., marketing research and consulting professionals) and policymakers.
IJRM aims to be at the forefront of the marketing field with a particular emphasis on bringing timely ideas to market. The journal embraces innovative research with the potential to spur future research and influence practice. Hence, it welcomes contributions in various aspects of marketing. The editors, while accepting a wide array of scholarly contributions from different disciplinary approaches, especially encourage research that is novel, visionary or path breaking.
Interviewee & Corresponding Author
Arnd Vomberg is Associate Professor of Marketing at HEC Paris. His research focuses on marketing strategy in business-to-business settings, with particular attention to three transformations shaping firms today: organizing for growth, digital transformation, and the role of marketing in society. Substantive topics include how B2B start-ups should allocate budgets between marketing and sales, the design and governance of multichannel sales systems, algorithmic and cross-channel pricing, employee responses to AI-enabled systems, and the interface between marketing and human resources.
His work has been published in leading journals across marketing — including the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and the International Journal of Research in Marketing — as well as in top journals in adjacent fields such as Strategic Management Journal, Information Systems Research, and the Journal of Product Innovation Management. He is co-editor of the Handbook of Market Research (Springer) and has co-edited special issues on AI and strategy development (Journal of Business Research) and on the war for talent at the sales frontlines (Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management). His research has been featured in outlets including the BBC and Le Monde and has drawn attention from policymakers, with the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets drawing on his work on algorithmic pricing.
Prior to joining HEC Paris in 2024, Arnd was a Full Professor at the University of Mannheim and an Associate Professor with tenure at the University of Groningen. He was a Visiting Scholar at Columbia Business School and earned his doctorate (summa cum laude) at the University of Mannheim. He serves as Track Chair for conferences (e.g., Marketing Strategy at EMAC 2026) and reviews regularly for leading journals in marketing and management. Alongside his academic work, he maintains a sustained engagement with industry through consulting projects spanning the chemicals, IT, healthcare, and energy sectors.
Co-Authors
Christian Homburg holds the Chair of Business-to-Business Marketing, Sales & Pricing at the University of Mannheim and is a Professorial Fellow at the University of Manchester (UK). He was the Director of the Institute for Market-Oriented Management (IMU) and served as an Area Editor for the Journal of Marketing. His research focuses on market-oriented management, customer relationship management, and sales management. His work has been published in leading academic journals such as the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, and Journal of Consumer Research. He has also been repeatedly recognized by WirtschaftsWoche as one of the most research-productive business scholars worldwide.
Panagiotis Sarantopoulos is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB) and an Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Manchester’s Alliance Manchester Business School (AMBS). His research interests revolve around contemporary issues in Digital Marketing, Retailing, and Pricing, with a particular interest in how AI is transforming consumer behavior. He specializes in quantitative research, employing behavioral experiments and econometric modeling to generate insights. His work appears or is forthcoming in world-leading academic journals, including the Journal of Marketing Research, the International Journal of Research in Marketing, the Journal of Service Research, and the Journal of Business Research, among others. He has received strong recognition in the form of best paper awards and funding from multinational companies.
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International Journal of Research in Marketing
Interviewee & Corresponding Author
Arnd Vomberg
Co-Authors
Christian Homburg
Panagiotis Sarantopoulos