Isabel Son
Isabel Son is an NWO Ph.D. Grant Candidate, at the Department of Business Studies, Leiden Law School, Leiden University. Isabel graduated from the University of Amsterdam, Economic Sciences cum laude and from Columbia University, New York with a Masters of Business Administration with honours.
She worked in multiple international commercial positions with global FMCG companies based from Rotterdam, Paris and London, respectively. As Global Strategic Business advisor she also spent over 10 years working from London consulting global clients.
For the Ph.D studies, Isabel was awarded a 5 year NWO - Dutch Research Council - Grant, researching in the topic of Pricing Strategy within the context of Behavioural Economics. Her research topic entails the heterogeneity of the utilization of price information cues in the context of consumer buying processes. The first research, a literature review on Internal Reference Pricing (IRP), lead to the article ‘75 Years of Internal Reference Price Research: A Review, Calibration of Taxonomy and Classification Framework’, is awaiting publication. Current fieldwork is undertaken for the 2nd article on ‘Consumer heterogeneity in IRP formation’.
Isabel, as lecturer at The Hotelschool The Hague (HTH), has been teaching on Pricing Strategy in the third year Minor courses, the MBA programme as well as a research track in Lycar 2. These efforts get students acquainted with the very broad research area of Pricing Strategy, a topic of high interest and relevance to revenue and general management.
Current understanding of how consumers utilise pricing information in buying situations, despite the vast amount of research undertaken over the last 75 years, are not clear cut. Some of this is attributable to difficulties in research set-up comparability as well as confusion on taxonomy. However majorly this could be the result of research omitting to allow for heterogeneity in consumer personality traits, leading to differences in approaches to buying decisions and formation of willingness to buy.
Isabel’s current Ph.D research is to shed light on this for commercial purposes highly relevant topic.