Upgrading, Degrading, and Intertemporal Price Discrimination
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Gea M Lee
The paper studies monopoly pricing of a vertically differentiated durable good in a two-period model. It provides an explanation for seemingly unusual practice of a firm selling a "degraded good," arguing that the presence of Coasian dynamics may lead to the sale of the degraded good that is not less costly to produce than a high-quality good. The main finding is that when the firm can identify previous customers only if they voluntarily reveal their past purchases, it sells the degraded good along with the high-quality good in the first period. When the firm sells an upgrade of the degraded good, the price of the high-quality good cannot be "too low" in the second period, since otherwise the upgrading customers would pretend to be new customers. Thus the firm can enhance first-period sales while mitigating consumers' incentive to wait until the next period.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Topics Article
- Non-robustness of some economic models
- Incentives for Boundedly Rational Agents
- On Non-responsiveness in Adverse Selection Models with Common Value
- Contributions Article
- Competitive Equilibria With Incomplete Markets and Endogenous Bankruptcy
- A One-Period Version of Rubinstein's Bargaining Game
- Upgrading, Degrading, and Intertemporal Price Discrimination
- Adverse Selection and Insurance Contracting: A Rank-Dependent Utility Analysis
- Incomplete Contracts with Cross-Investments
- Communication and Voting with Double-Sided Information
- Signal Jamming in Games with Multiple Senders
- Homothetic or Cobb-Douglas Behavior Through Aggregation
- Advances Article
- The Generalized Linear Production Model: Solvability, Nonsubstitution and Productivity Measurement
- Contagion and State Dependent Mutations
- Rationalization and Incomplete Information
- Contractual Externalities and Common Agency Equilibria
- Market Research and Market Design
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Topics Article
- Non-robustness of some economic models
- Incentives for Boundedly Rational Agents
- On Non-responsiveness in Adverse Selection Models with Common Value
- Contributions Article
- Competitive Equilibria With Incomplete Markets and Endogenous Bankruptcy
- A One-Period Version of Rubinstein's Bargaining Game
- Upgrading, Degrading, and Intertemporal Price Discrimination
- Adverse Selection and Insurance Contracting: A Rank-Dependent Utility Analysis
- Incomplete Contracts with Cross-Investments
- Communication and Voting with Double-Sided Information
- Signal Jamming in Games with Multiple Senders
- Homothetic or Cobb-Douglas Behavior Through Aggregation
- Advances Article
- The Generalized Linear Production Model: Solvability, Nonsubstitution and Productivity Measurement
- Contagion and State Dependent Mutations
- Rationalization and Incomplete Information
- Contractual Externalities and Common Agency Equilibria
- Market Research and Market Design