ABSTRACT
This chapter moves beyond the two perspectives, namely consumer lifetime value and reference price, to view the dyadic aspects of price through the lens of sociocultural theory. Extending Zelizer's work on money, it details how price is situated in an implicit web of culturally embedded moral relationships connecting a seller, a buyer, and numerous other actors, including employees, suppliers, and other potential buyers. The chapter addresses price as a moral assessment grounded in a social order that structures who has to do what in order to receive what from whom. It explicates some moral and cultural dimensions of pricing that are masked in research that regards price as the numerical quantity of money requested by the seller and paid by the buyer based on their economic evaluations of the item being sold. The chapter addresses four empirical contexts: a farmers market, a farm produce stand, an Indian restaurant, and a private school.
