A Strategy to Address Business Community Platforms Pricing Challenges

In this paper we present an exploratory case study of a business community platform in a sea port setting. We focus on pricing challenges faced by this type of inter-organizational information systems. We find that traditional cost based pricing methods in the form of transaction and subscription fees poorly cope with the following business community platform characteristics: 1) users of the system can be also contributors (i.e. they provide data for the system); 2) the services within the platform can have a hierarchical structure in which old services provide input for new services. We propose a new pricing strategy that accounts for these specific challenges. This strategy relies on two building blocks: user value based pricing and fair sharing. The approach aims at aligning the incentives for individual users to adopt a business community platform and the community wide benefit from the platform's introduction.