Bargains Followed by Bargains: When Switching Costs Make Markets More Competitive

In markets where consumers have switching costs and firms cannot price discriminate, firms have two conflicting strategies. A firm can either offer a low price to attract new consumers and build future market share or a firm can offer a high price to exploit the partial lock-in of their existing consumers. This paper develops a theory of competition when overlapping generations of consumers have switching costs and firms produce differentiated products. Competition takes place over an infinite horizon with any number of firms. This paper shows that the relationship between the level of switching costs and the number of firms determines whether firms offer low or high prices. Similar to previous duopoly studies, switching costs are likely to facilitate higher equilibrium prices only when there is a small number of firms and switching costs are large. Unlike previous studies this paper demonstrates that with a sufficiently large number of firms, switching costs have the opposite effect and prices are lower with switching costs when compared to equilibrium prices without switching costs. The equilibrium of the model also contains realistic features uncommon to other models in the literature where some consumers switch in equilibrium and a symmetric pure strategy price exists with more than two firms.