Strategic loyalty reward in dynamic price Discrimination

This paper proposes a dynamic model of duopolistic competition under behaviorbased price discrimination with the following property: in equilibrium, a firm may reward its previous customers although long term contracts are not enforceable. A firm can offer a lower price to its previous customers than to its new customers as a strategic means to hamper its rival to gather precise information on the young generation of customers for subsequent profitable behavior-based pricing. The result holds both with myopic and forward-looking, impatient enough consumers.Price discrimination ; Dynamic pricing ; Loyalty reward

Behavior-based price discrimination and customer information sharing

This article investigates the incentives and the effects of information sharing among rivalfirms about the identities of their past customers in a two-period model with behaviorbasedprice discrimination (BBPD). An unilateral information exchange between the twoperiods takes place in a subgame-perfect equilibrium. This exchange increases the abilityof the industry to price discriminate consumers according to their profiles and boosts theprofitability of BBPD at the expense of consumers

The price discrimination effect of a large merger of parking garages

International audienceThis note investigates the effects of a large horizontal merger on the shape of the 1-to-12 h price menus offered by parking garages in Paris. The merger caused low-end prices to increase proportionally more than high-end prices. This results in larger discounts on longer hours and hence in more price discrimination between short-term and long-term motorists

Information provision and behaviour-based price discrimination

This article examines a model wherein firms first advertise their existence to consumers and, in the two following periods, compete with uniform pricing and then with behaviour-based price discrimination. I show that allowing firms to price discriminate can restore symmetry in equilibrium advertising decisions. I also establish that price discrimination increases (resp. decreases) profits and total welfare but hurts (resp. benefits) consumers when the advertising cost is high (resp. low)

Information provision and behaviour-based price discrimination

This article examines a model wherein firms first advertise their existence to consumers and, in the two following periods, compete with uniform pricing and then with behaviour-based price discrimination. I show that allowing firms to price discriminate can restore symmetry in equilibrium advertising decisions. I also establish that price discrimination increases (resp. decreases) profits and total welfare but hurts (resp. benefits) consumers when the advertising cost is high (resp. low)

Further results on the Bertrand game with different marginal costs

This note provides an alternative construction to Blume (2003) of equilibria in the standard model of Bertrand competition with homogeneous products and different marginal costs that achieve the conventional outcome. In addition, I provide a means to select one of these equilibria

Behavior-based pricing with experience goods

We consider a two-period model in which duopolists sell experience goods and practice behavior-based price discrimination (BBPD). We give general conditions for when firms should offer a lower price to existing customers ('pay-to-stay') or to new customers ('pay-to-switch'). We also demonstrate that unlike previous results, BBPD may intensify competition in the first period but weaken it in the second

Online advertising and privacy

An online platform makes a profit by auctioning an advertising slot that appears whenever a consumer visits its website. Several firms compete in the auction, and consumers differ in their preferences. Prior to the auction, the platform gathers data which is statistically correlated with consumers' tastes for products. We study the implications of the platform's decision to allow potential advertisers to access the data about consumers' characteristics before they bid. On top of the familiar trade-off between rent extraction and efficiency, we identify a new trade-off: the disclosure of information leads to a better matching between firms and consumers, but results in a higher equilibrum price on the product market. We find that the equilbrium price is an increasing function of the number of firms. As the number of firms becomes large, it is always profitable for the platform to disclose the information, but this need not be efficient, because of the distortion caused by the higher prices. When the quality of the match represents vertical shifts in the demand function, we provide conditions under which disclosure is optimal

Online Advertising and Privacy

An online platform makes a profit by auctioning an advertising slot that appears whenever a consumer visits its website. Several firms compete in the auction, and consumers differ in their preferences. Prior to the auction, the platform gathers data which is statistically correlated with consumers' tastes for products. We study the implications of the platform's decision to allow potential advertisers to access the data about consumers' characteristics before they bid. On top of the familiar trade-off between rent extraction and efficiency, we identify a new trade- off: the disclosure of information leads to a better matching between firms and consumers, but results in a higher equilibrium price on the product market. We find that the equilibrium price is an increasing function of the number of firms. As the number of firms becomes large, it is always profitable for the platform to disclose the information, but this need not be efficient, because of the distortion caused by the higher prices. When the quality of the match represents vertical shifts in the demand function, we provide conditions under which disclosure is optimal