I'm not an economist, and can't point to to anything in particular, but I would be skeptical of anything that claimed a general approach to that. "Optimal" depends entirely on what you're optimizing for, which is basically an infinite possibility space. I could need a significant amount of revenue immediately to accomplish a desired business development, or I could have plenty of cash and want to build a large and loyal long term customer base at the cost of immediate profit. As you say, successful businesses exist doing pretty much everything. The only limiting factor is being a viable ongoing concern (and that can just mean having a rich backer). I'm sure there are things discussing optimizing based on small slices of the possibility space though (but all the normal caveats about economists making dumb assumptions that rarely apply to humans apply even to those).

> Amazon employee working in Physical Consumer (not AWS)

You too? I'm in AFT. I posted the original "whatever the customer is willing to pay" comment. Mostly just offhand and yeah there's a lot of nuance to it.

I don't mean that anyone should want to individually gouge each customer, but when running a business one should pick a price whereby the total long term profit is maximized.

Your pricing determines the number of customers. Your pricing also determines the profit on each customer. But choosing your pricing strategy correctly, you should have some people who won't buy your product.