14,910 research outputs found

    Dynamic Price Discrimination and Quality Provision Based on Purchase History

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    This paper develops a general two-period model of product line pricing with customer recognition. Specifically, we consider a monopolist who can sell vertically differentiated products over two periods to heterogeneous consumers. Each consumer demands one unit of the product in each period. In the second period, the monopolist can condition the price-quality offers on the observed purchasing behavior in the first period. In this setup, the monopolist can price discriminate consumers not only by quality, but also by purchase history. Several interesting results are derived. First, we fully characterize the monopolist's optimal pricing strategy when there are two types of consumers, and a simple condition is given to determine whether the monopolist will price discriminate by quality in the first period. We compare it to the case when there is no customer recognition or the firm is able to commit to its future actions. When the type space is a continuum, we show that there is no fully separating equilibrium, and some properties of the optimal contracts (price-quality pairs) are characterized within the class of partitional PBE.Price discrimination; Supermodularity; Submodularity; Behavior-Based Pricing; Ratchet Effect; Bunching

    Competition versus Collusion: The Impact of Consumer Inertia

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    We consider a model of dynamic price competition to analyze the impact of consumer inertia on the ability of firms to sustain high prices. Three main consequences are identified, all of which contrast with predictions of the standard model of collusion: (i) maintaining high prices does not require punishment strategies when firms are sufficiently myopic, (ii) if buyers are sufficiently inert, then high prices can be sustained for all discount factors, and (iii) the ability to maintain high prices may depend non-monotonically on the level of the discount factor when the industry exhibits network externalities and demand is sufficiently viscous. These results provide a number of interesting insights with regard to competitive and collusive pricing behavior. In particular, we illustrate how direct communication between firms may facilitate collusion.microeconomics ;

    Monopoly Pricing of Experience Goods

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    We develop a dynamic model of experience goods pricing with independent private valuations. We show that the optimal paths of sales and prices can be described in terms of a simple dichotomy. In a mass market, prices are declining over time. In a niche market, the optimal prices are initially low followed by higher prices that extract surplus from the buyers with a high willingness to pay. We consider extensions of the model to integrate elements of social rather than private learning and turnover among buyers.Monopoly, dynamic pricing, learning, experience goods, continuous time, Markov perfect equilibrium

    Experimentation in Two-Sided Markets

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    We study optimal experimentation by a monopolistic platform in a two-sided market framework. The platform provider faces uncertainty about the strength of the externality each side is exerting on the other. It maximizes the expected present value of its profit stream in a continuous-time infinite-horizon framework by setting participation fees or quantities on both sides. We show that a price-setting platform provider sets a fee lower than the myopically optimal level on at least one side of the market, and on both sides if the two externalities are of approximately equal strenght. If the externality that one side exerts is sufficiently weaker than the externality it experiences, the optimal fee on this side exceeds the myopically optimal level. We obtain analogous results for expected prives when the platform provider chooses quantities. While the optimal policy does not admin closed-form representations in general, we identify special cases in which the undiscounted limit of the model can be solved in closed form

    ์ „๋žต์  ๊ณ ๊ฐ ํ–‰๋™์„ ๊ณ ๋ คํ•œ ์‹ฌ์ธต ๊ฐ•ํ™”ํ•™์Šต ๊ธฐ๋ฐ˜ ํ•ญ๊ณต์‚ฌ ๋™์  ๊ฐ€๊ฒฉ ๊ฒฐ์ • ์—ฐ๊ตฌ

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    ํ•™์œ„๋…ผ๋ฌธ(์„์‚ฌ) -- ์„œ์šธ๋Œ€ํ•™๊ต๋Œ€ํ•™์› : ๊ณต๊ณผ๋Œ€ํ•™ ์‚ฐ์—…๊ณตํ•™๊ณผ, 2023. 2. ๋ฌธ์ผ๊ฒฝ.This thesis considers an airline dynamic pricing problem in the presence of patient customers. Nowadays, customers behave strategically to pay lower than their willingness to pay because they know airlines are implementing dynamic pricing strategies. To capture the non-myopic characteristic, we propose a Markov decision process (MDP) including a history of offered prices as a state variable. In contrast to previous studies, distributions of customers' properties are assumed to be unknown in advance. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms are utilized to solve it, and the results of numerical experiments are presented to show that their performance can be improved with the proposed formulation. Comparisons between algorithms are also made to determine which can construct appropriate pricing structures for the patient and non-stationary demand. The structures of pricing policies generated from the bootstrapped deep Q-network algorithm imply that airlines should offer high and low prices alternately from the beginning of the sales period rather than increasing prices as time goes on. We also ascertain that more frequent consecutive high-priced periods can increase airlines' revenue in environments with higher customer patience levels.๋ณธ ์—ฐ๊ตฌ์—์„œ๋Š” ์ „๋žต์  ์†Œ๋น„์ž๊ฐ€ ์กด์žฌํ•˜๋Š” ์‹œ์žฅ์—์„œ ํ•ญ๊ณต์‚ฌ ๋™์  ๊ฐ€๊ฒฉ ๊ฒฐ์ • ๋ฌธ์ œ๋ฅผ ๋‹ค๋ฃจ์—ˆ๋‹ค. ์ตœ๊ทผ ์†Œ๋น„์ž๋“ค์€ ํ•ญ๊ณต์‚ฌ์—์„œ ๋™์  ๊ฐ€๊ฒฉ ์ •์ฑ…์„ ์‹œํ–‰ํ•˜๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์„ ์ธ์ง€ํ•˜๊ณ  ์žˆ๊ธฐ ๋•Œ๋ฌธ์—, ๊ทธ๋“ค์˜ ์ง€๋ถˆ ์šฉ์˜๋ณด๋‹ค ๋‚ฎ์€ ๊ฐ€๊ฒฉ์„ ์ง€๋ถˆํ•˜๊ธฐ ์œ„ํ•ด ์ „๋žต์ ์œผ๋กœ ํ–‰๋™ํ•œ๋‹ค. ์ด๋Ÿฌํ•œ ์†Œ๋น„์ž ํŠน์„ฑ์„ ๊ณ ๋ คํ•˜์—ฌ, ๋ณธ ์—ฐ๊ตฌ์—์„œ๋Š” ๊ณผ๊ฑฐ์— ์ œ์‹œ๋œ ๊ฐ€๊ฒฉ ๊ธฐ๋ก์„ ์ƒํƒœ ๋ณ€์ˆ˜๋กœ ํฌํ•จํ•˜๋Š” ๋งˆ๋ฅด์ฝ”ํ”„ ์˜์‚ฌ๊ฒฐ์ • ๊ณผ์ • ๋ชจ๋ธ์„ ์ œ์•ˆํ•˜์˜€๋‹ค. ์ด ๋•Œ ๊ณ ๊ฐ ํŠน์„ฑ์— ๋Œ€ํ•œ ํ™•๋ฅ  ๋ถ„ํฌ๋“ค์€ ์‚ฌ์ „์— ์•Œ๋ ค์ ธ ์žˆ์ง€ ์•Š๋‹ค๊ณ  ๊ฐ€์ •ํ•˜์˜€๋‹ค. ๋ฌธ์ œ ํ•ด๊ฒฐ์„ ์œ„ํ•ด ์‹ฌ์ธต ๊ฐ•ํ™”ํ•™์Šต ๋ฐฉ๋ฒ•๋ก ์ด ํ™œ์šฉ๋˜์—ˆ์œผ๋ฉฐ, ์•Œ๊ณ ๋ฆฌ์ฆ˜ ๋ณ„ ๋น„๊ต๋ฅผ ํ†ตํ•ด ์ „๋žต์ ์ด๊ณ  ๋™์ ์ธ ์ˆ˜์š” ํ•˜์—์„œ ๊ฐ€์žฅ ์ ์ ˆํ•œ ๊ฐ€๊ฒฉ ๊ตฌ์กฐ๋ฅผ ๋„์ถœํ•˜๋Š” ์•Œ๊ณ ๋ฆฌ์ฆ˜์„ ์ œ์‹œํ•˜์˜€๋‹ค. ๋˜ํ•œ ํ•ด๋‹น ๊ฐ€๊ฒฉ ๊ตฌ์กฐ๋ฅผ ๋ถ„์„ํ•˜์—ฌ ์ „๋žต์  ์ˆ˜์š”๋กœ๋ถ€ํ„ฐ ์ถ”๊ฐ€์ ์ธ ์ˆ˜์ต์„ ๋ฐœ์ƒ์‹œํ‚ค๊ธฐ ์œ„ํ•œ ๊ฒฝ์˜์  ํ†ต์ฐฐ๋ ฅ์„ ์ œ๊ณตํ•˜๊ณ ์ž ํ•˜์˜€๋‹ค.Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Chapter 2 Problem description 9 2.1 Dynamics of patient customers 9 2.2 Markov decision process 11 2.3 Airline dynamic pricing 11 Chapter 3 Solution methods 15 3.1 Deep Q-network 17 3.2 Bootstrapped DQN 18 3.3 Optimistic learning for decreasing cyclic policies 21 Chapter 4 Numerical experiments 23 4.1 Comparison between MDP formulations in the presence of patient customers 24 4.2 Comparison between pricing algorithms for non-stationary demand and insufficient inventory 27 4.3 Structure of pricing policies from the BDQN algorithm 33 4.4 Non-stationary test for the distributions of reservation prices 34 Chapter 5 Conclusions 38 Bibliography 41 ๊ตญ๋ฌธ์ดˆ๋ก 47์„

    Incomplete cost pass-through under deep habits

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    A number of empirical studies document that marginal cost shocks are not fully passed through to prices at the firm level and that prices are substantially less volatile than costs. We show that in the relative-deep-habits model of Ravn, Schmitt-Grohe, and Uribe (2006), firm-specific marginal cost shocks are not fully passed through to product prices. That is, in response to a firm-specific increase in marginal costs, prices rise, but by less than marginal costs leading to a decline in the firm-specific markup of prices over marginal costs. Pass-through is predicted to be even lower when shocks to marginal costs are anticipated by firms. In our model, unanticipated firm-specific cost shocks lead to incomplete pass-through (or a decline in markups) of about 20 percent and anticipated cost shocks are associated with incomplete pass-through of about 50 percent. The model predicts that cost pass-through is increasing in the persistence of marginal cost shocks and U-shaped in the strength of habits. The relative-deep-habits model implies that conditional on marginal cost disturbances, prices are less volatile than marginal costs
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