Identifying and Ranking the Factors Affecting Pricing of Information Goods in Iranian Information Centers

In today's world of business and economics, information that is reused, shared, and exchanged has become a commercial good. Information goods are digital goods that are transmitted through information networks such as the Internet. Information centers are one of the most important publishers of information goods. The pricing of information goods is subject to its conditions and is different from the pricing of other goods and services. Due to the complexity of the concept of pricing of information goods, it is necessary to gather complete information about the effective factors. In this regard, the present study seeks to identify and prioritize these factors.

In the first step, by library study and searching reliable domestic and foreign scientific databases, existing researches in this field are reviewed and a list of effective factors in the pricing of information goods are identified. Based on the mentioned list, a conceptual model and research hypotheses have been developed. A questionnaire was used to collect the data needed to test the hypotheses. The sample includes 220 managers and experts of Iranian information centers who were selected by snowball sampling method. In addition, Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests, one-sample t-test, were used to test the hypotheses and the Friedman test was used to rank the factors in SPSS software.

Based on the results, the factors affecting the pricing of information goods are:  Ease of access, ease of purchase, content, usefulness, appropriate supply channel, the existence of a marketing unit, awareness about competitors' pricing methods, publication schedule, and an accurate costing method. The results of the analysis also showed that the order of importance of these factors is: 1- An accurate costing method, 2- Content, 3- Appropriate supply channel  4- Awareness about competitors' pricing methods, 5-The existence of a marketing unit,                                6- Publication schedule, 7- usefulness, 8- Ease of access, and 9- Ease of purchase.

This study, while providing a list of factors affecting the pricing of information goods, shows that an accurate costing method is the most important factor in pricing because the cost calculation in pricing information goods has many complexities. In addition, in this study, based on the findings, some management strategies for effective pricing of information goods have been proposed, the most important of which are: Reduction of activities, complexity, and difficulty of cost calculations in determining the price, Update and accuracy of content, and Create and develop of diverse and secure communication channels with customers.