Research on bundled pricing strategies for data products and services considering corporate user perceived value

Purpose In B2B data transactions, the organizational purchasing behavior of enterprise users involves complex decision-making factors such as multidepartmental collaboration. The perceived value of data products’ additional services by these users is highly uncertain, which poses a severe challenge to the bundling pricing strategies of the platforms. This paper aims to address how this uncertainty affects the effectiveness of bundling pricing strategies in data trading platforms, as well as market demand and profits. Design/methodology/approach Based on B2B marketing research, this paper combines the theory of organizational purchasing behavior with the Hotelling duopoly competition model to construct a game model of bundled sales and separate sales for data trading platforms, revealing the influence mechanism of the uncertainty of the perceived value of additional services by corporate users on pricing strategies. Findings When the perceived value coefficient of corporate users exceeds a critical value, the market demand for bundled products and the platform profit increase nonlinearly, verifying the threshold effect of service value co-creation in the B2B scenario. In a competitive environment, the market share of bundled products is significantly positively correlated with the pricing of competing products but negatively correlated with the internal pricing of the platform, indicating that B2B pricing needs to take into account both competitive relationships and the value perception of corporate users. The existence of perceived value boundary values distinguishes the bidirectional regulatory effect of search costs on demand volume, providing a decision-making basis for differentiated pricing. Originality/value This study expands the application of the traditional bundled pricing theory in interorganizational transactions by introducing the B2B unique concept of “value-cost dual constraints,” providing suggestions for B2B data platforms to optimize service portfolios, design pricing mechanisms and enhance the efficiency of cross-organizational data element allocation.