Confessions of the Pricing Man

Simon founded the pricing consultancy Simon Kucher and wrote this as a career retrospective rather than a textbook, which keeps the arguments concrete and the examples real. He covers what a price communicates to a buyer, why the value a customer perceives sets the ceiling while cost sets only the floor, and how one product can support several prices through segmentation and bundling. Long passages deal with price wars and why they are usually lost by whoever starts them, and with the psychology that makes a number feel expensive. The examples run from cars and pharmaceuticals to software, so a software reader has some translation to do. Read it before a pricing decision rather than during one.