Decision anatomy
Accountable owner
Chief Revenue Officer, pricing leader, or delegated commercial owner
Recurrence
Continuous or campaign/event-driven
Reversibility
High for future offers, low for completed transactions or publicly anchored prices.
Cost of error
High at scale through margin leakage, lost demand, unfair treatment, or brand damage.
Evidence
- unit economics
- demand and elasticity
- competitive context
- customer and segment context
- inventory, capacity, and contractual commitments
Alternatives
- candidate price points
- discount levels
- bundles
- hold current price
- decline transaction
Objectives
- margin
- revenue
- conversion
- retention
- strategic positioning
Constraints
- price floors
- contracts
- fairness and regulation
- inventory
- channel policy
Uncertainty
- elasticity
- competitive response
- causal attribution
- long-term customer impact
How AI may participate
This is design guidance for the archetype, not a universal maturity requirement or a claim about a particular product.
- Assemble demand, cost, inventory, competitive, contractual, and segment evidence with provenance and effective time.
- Evaluate explicit price alternatives and non-price alternatives against margin, demand, service, and strategic objectives.
- Provide sensitivity ranges rather than hiding elasticity, competitor-response, or attribution uncertainty.
Authority and retained human judgment
Use recommendation or human-approved proposal by default. A price change should become effectful only inside explicit product, geography, duration, magnitude, eligibility, and review limits.
What accountable people still decide
- Whether the price is consistent with customer commitments, market strategy, and applicable policy or law.
- How to balance short-term margin against trust, fairness, adoption, and long-term value.
- Whether exceptional market conditions make historical response evidence unreliable.
Outcome observability
Conversion and margin are fast; retention and market response take longer and require attribution.
Evaluation and trace
- Predefine the comparator, affected population, expected demand and margin response, and review horizon.
- Measure realized demand, margin, churn, complaints, and distributional effects without claiming causality the design cannot support.
- Record overrides and concurrent promotions or market shocks that weaken attribution.
Failure and abstention conditions
- Abstain when cost, availability, eligibility, or contractual evidence is incomplete.
- Do not infer willingness to pay from sensitive or prohibited proxies.
- Escalate large, hard-to-reverse, novel, or high-impact changes for domain and accountable-owner review.
Assess your version of this decision
An archetype cannot determine the right authority boundary by itself. Decisagent Fit separately assesses useful AI participation and supportable action authority from your decision context.