We analyze the effect of different pricing schemes on horizontally differentiated firms' ability to sustain collusion when customers have the possibility to combine (or mix) products to achieve a better match of their preferences. To this end, we compare two-part tariffs with linear prices and...

This paper studies static rational inattention problems with multiple actions and multiple shocks. We solve for the optimal signals chosen by agents and provide tools to interpret information processing. By relaxing restrictive assumptions previously used to gain tractability, we allow agents...

Firms selling multiple products usually adopt bundle pricing in their marketing strategy for the purpose of extracting large consumer surplus. In this paper, we propose and analyze a bundling mechanism, referred to as component pricing with a bundle size discount (CPBSD), which sells bundles for...

We examine taste-based and statistical discrimination in an online market. Our approach investigates the unique setting of baseball cards to detect consumer tastes for discrimination based on the race of the player on the card. Our data set allows us to track the transaction history of each...

Third-degree online price discrimination can be welfare-improving when the online-offline cross-demand parameter is large, even though the total outputs are unchanged. However, if the online firm competes with a uniform-pricing chain-store, online discrimination is welfare-worsening. Extensive...

This study analyzes a monopolistic seller’s optimal differential pricing problem with strategic consumers connected in social networks. The consumers who purchase in the later period can get positive externality from their friends who purchased in the early period but have to bear a utility...

We analyze the welfare effects of price discrimination by a monopolistic platform that mediates between two sides of a market. Discrimination is based on asymmetric costs on one side of the market and may be allowed on either or both sides. We show that unconstrained discrimination on both sides...

This paper provides the first evidence for discriminatory behaviour against female consumers in the annuity market. It focuses on Chile, where an electronic bidding system allows retirees to receive offers, simultaneously, from several firms in the market for the same standardised annuity...

This paper assesses the profit and welfare effects of firms' ability to charge personalized prices in markets where consumer demand is sensitive to price changes. In a mill pricing model, regardless of demand elasticity, personalized pricing (PP) raises consumer surplus at the expense of...

Firms in many industries may obtain superior knowledge of customer preferences, whereas customers often need costly efforts to learn their match values. In this pa-per, we examine the optimal pricing strategies for a firm with superior knowledge, when customers can reduce information asymmetry...

Perfect, or the first-degree, price discrimination is a practice to charge a customer different price on every unit of the same product. So the first unit carries the highest price, the second lower, etc. Varian (1993, p.421) used an example, “a small-town doctor who charges his patients...

The third-degree price discrimination theory charges a lower price to a more elastic demand. This paper unveils an unpleasant result of such theory: the lower price comes with less quantity. This paper further reveals the true meaning of elasticity pricing

An incumbent supplier can use exclusive dealing contracts with buyers to prevent entry of an efficient rival when those contracts include an agreement over price. The linear price in the unique exclusionary equilibrium is above (below) the incumbent’s variable cost when buyers compete over...

Policy makers use reference pricing to curb pharmaceutical expenditures by reducing coverage of expensive branded drugs. In a theoretical analysis we show that the net effect of reference pricing is generally ambiguous when accounting for entry by generic producers. Reference pricing shifts...

An imperfectly-informed regulator needs to procure multiple units of some good (e.g., green energy, market liquidity, pollution reduction, land conservation) that can be produced with heterogeneous technologies at various costs. How should she optimally procure these units? Should she run...

This study investigates mixed markets in which a social welfare-maximizing public firm and a private firm engage in behavior-based price discrimination (BBPD). Total of two cases are considered: one where domestic shareholders completely own the private firm and one where foreign shareholders...

We explore theoretically and empirically the within-route price discrimination in liner shipping and condition it on the market density. Using transaction-level data from over 200 Chilean import port-to-port routes, we confirm our theoretical predictions and demonstrate their robustness and...

Similar to the perfect one, second-degree price discrimination charges different price for different quantity. Unlike the perfect one, this time the discount is massive, and the quantity difference even so. An obvious explanation is that the customer is a wholesaler, who has a larger demand...

We consider a model where for-profit providers compete in quality in a price-regulated market that has been opened to competition, and where the incumbent is located at the center of the market, facing high costs of relocation. The model is relevant in markets such as public health care,...

Whether input suppliers charge customized (discriminatory) or industry-wide (uniform) prices affects downstream manufacturers' incentives to innovate. This paper investigates the implications of input price discrimination when an upstream monopolist commits to prices before downstream firms make...

This paper develops an oligopoly model in which firms first choose capacity and then compete in prices in a series of advance-purchase markets. We show that when the elasticity of demand falls across periods, strong competitive forces prevent firms from utilizing intertemporal price...

A monopolistic seller is marketing a good to a customer whose willingness to pay is determined by both his private type and the “quality.” The seller can design a menu of both prices and experiments - that reveal information about quality. We show that the optimal mechanism features both...

In this paper, we analyse the price discrimination and household switching in the residential mortgage market. Accessing a unique proprietary micro-data set from Norway, we examine the difference between the loan rate paid by current clients when receiving a competing offer from another bank and...

A durable good monopolist faces a continuum of heterogeneous customers who make purchase decisions by comparing present and expected price-quality offers. The monopolist designs a sequence of price-quality menus to segment the market. We consider the Markov Perfect Equilibrium (MPE) of a game...

This paper shows that shipping industry could hamper the endogenous firm selection into production which is conducive to overall productivity enhancement and welfare gains, through its discriminatory price. Naturally, if the shipping industry charges higher transport price to more productive...

Resale of used products may shrink the new-product market and create the cannibalization problem. This problem is exacerbated in the digital goods market because copies of digital goods can be perfect substitutes of the original. Many digital goods/service producers take advantage of technology...

This paper studies the effects of misspecified boundaries of competition on optimal retail pricing using store-level supermarket scanner data. We focus on two types of misspecification: (i) misspecification of the demand estimation problem, which can arise from either defining the product market...

Price discrimination strategies, which offer different prices to customers based on differences in their valuations, have become common practice. While it allows sellers to increase their profits, it also raises several concerns in terms of fairness, e.g., by charging higher prices (or denying...

The undesirable but inevitable consequence of running promotions is that consumers can be trained to time their purchases strategically. In this paper, we study randomized promotions, where the firm randomly offers discounts over time, as an alternative strategy of intertemporal price...

We characterise the large number of mortgage offers for which people qualify. Almost no one picks the cheapest option, nonetheless the one selected is not usually much more expensive. A few borrowers make very expensive choices. These big mistakes are most common when the menu they face has many...

This work is motivated by the common practice of add-on pricing, where an add-on is not valuable unless purchased together with the main service. For example, many restaurants serve free bread or complimentary drinks (add-on) while diners are waiting for their entrees (main service) to be...

We present tight bounds and heuristics for personalized, multi-product pricing problems. Under mild conditions we show that offering a non-personalize price in the direction of a positive vector (factor) has a tight profit guarantee relative to optimal personalized pricing. An optimal...

This paper examines the output effect of third-degree price discrimination in symmetrically differentiated oligopoly. We find that when the sellers' input costs are chosen endogenously by an upstream supplier with market power, as opposed to being fixed exogenously, long-standing qualitative...

Mediating transactions through the Internet removes important cues that salespeople can use to assess a consumer's willingness to pay. We analyze whether dealers' difficulty in identifying consumer characteristics on the Internet and consumers' ease in finding information affects equilibrium...

Social enterprises (SEs) have been active for some decades and have been regulated by law in several countries. Their operation showed ability to complement the provision of welfare services, especially social services, by the public sector and private enterprises, and to innovate in the...

With the advent of big data, unique opportunities arise for data collection and analysis and thus for personalized pricing. We simulate a self-learning algorithm setting personalized prices based on additional information about consumer sensitivities in order to analyze market outcomes for...

This article provides a tractable model of inter-temporal price-discrimination by heterogeneous firms, imperative for our understanding of advance purchase markets in the wake of entry. The pricing schedule of a more efficient entrant is found to differ systematically from the pricing schedule...