Bill Hooker has used Elsevier data to show that there is "no apparent correlation between IF [impact factor] and price." Excerpt:
…Interesting, no? If the primary measure of a journal’s value is its impact — pretty layouts and a good Employment section and so on being presumably secondary — and if the Impact Factor is a measure of impact, and if publishers are making a good faith effort to offer value for money — then why is there no apparent relationship between IF and journal prices? After all, publishers tout the Impact Factors of their offerings whenever they’re asked to justify their prices or the latest round of increases in same.
There’s even some evidence from the same dataset that Impact Factors do influence journal pricing, at least in a "we can charge more if we have one" kinda way. Comparing the prices of journals with or without IFs indicates that, within this Elsevier/Life Sciences set, journals with IFs are higher priced and less variable in price….
Comment. Also see White and Creaser 2007, which showed little correlation between price and impact factor. Bergstrom and Bergstrom 2004 showed that journal prices are either unrelated to citation impact or inversely related to it:
[L]ibraries typically must pay 4 to 6 times as much per page for journals owned by commercial publishers as for journals owned by non-profit societies. These differences in price do not reflect differences in the quality of the journals [as measured by citations]. In fact the commercial journals are on average less cited than the non-profits and the average cost per citation of commercial journals ranges from 5 to 15 times as high as that of their non-profit counterparts.