Intertemporal Price Discrimination via Reference Price Effects

We consider the dynamic pricing problem a monopolistic seller faces when customers arrive in heterogeneous time periods and their purchase decisions are affected by reference prices formed from their past purchase experiences. We illustrate that a new form of price discrimination opportunity exists in such situations, where the seller's optimal pricing strategy is a cyclic one, even when the customers are loss-neutral and their demand functions are identical. This result differs from those in prior studies where the optimal price paths are shown to be asymptotically constant when customer arrival times are homogeneous or when there are no reference price effects, thus is unique due to the interaction between the heterogeneous arrivals and the reference price effects. We also provide the length of the cycle when the demand function is linear. In this era where customer information becomes easier accessible, our results suggest the seller consider this new dimension of price discrimination in conjunction with the old ones, in order to take advantage of the full power of customer data