Abstract
Pricing is the only element of the marketing mix that directly generates revenue, yet it remains comparatively underexplored and unevenly developed in both academic research and managerial practice, particularly in service contexts. This editorial introduces the special issue on Pricing for Services of the Journal of Service Management Research. We argue that the distinctive characteristics of services – intangibility, heterogeneity, inseparability, and perishability – make pricing inherently more complex than in goods markets, a complexity further reinforced by servitization and the growing prevalence of subscription-based business models. Against this backdrop, we outline four developments that shape the current frontier of service pricing research: (1) shifts in customer behavior and pricing models, (2) the emergence of new monetization approaches, (3) the expanding role of digital technologies in pricing, and (4) the organizational foundations of pricing capabilities. The four papers in this special issue provide theoretical and empirical insights across these domains.
