Price Discrimination Flashcards
Price Discrimination
a. Different units of a product are sold at different prices
b. Exploits differences in utility / willingness-to-pay
c. Goal: generate higher profit
Degrees of Price Discrimination (Pigou):
a. First degree: each customer pays as much as she is willing to pay (= perfect price discrimination)
b. Second degree: different prices are offered, and each customer self-selects one
c. Third degree: the company identifies and separates segments, and offers different prices to these segments
Types of Price Discrimination
- 1st degree - Negotiations, Auctions
- 2nd degree - Performance-based, Volume-based (nonlinear pricing), Regional
- 3rd degree - Regional, Person-based, Time-based, Multi-person pricing
Price Discrimination Based on Customer Segments
- Customers / segments differ in their willingness-to-pay
- Aggregation across customers results in the following price response function for the complete market: Q = 100 – 10 ∙ P
Price Discrimination Based on Customer Segments - Success factors
a. Information about the willingness-to-pay of different customers / segments
b. Ability to separate customers / segments (avoid arbitrage)
Bundling
- Bundling = Sales of different products as a bundle
- Types:
a. Pure bundling
b. Mixed bundling - Examples:
a. Opera: Season ticket
b. Restaurant: 3 course menu
c. Vacation package: flight + hotel
d. Trade show: booth space + services for exhibitors
Profitability of Bundling
a. Takes advantage of the asymmetry of willingness-to-pay
b. Additional utility through integration of products
e. g., purchase of booth & services as a bundle
c. Cost advantages
d. Price perception (integration of losses)
Pure vs. Mixed Bundling
- Mixed bundling often more profitable
a. Fewer legal restrictions
b. Higher profit, if
i. Willingness-to-pay differs across customers
ii. Competition - Pure Bundling more profitable for new products
a. –> brings all customers in contact with the new product
Nonlinear Pricing - general idea
a. Price per unit is different for different quantities
b. Second degree price discrimination (customers choose which quantity to buy)
c. Profitable because marginal utility decreases with increasing quantity
Nonlinear Pricing - Forms
a. Flat rate
b. All-units quantity discount
c. Two-part tariff
d. Optional (block) tariff
e. Price points
Biases in Tariff Choice
- Assumption so far: Customers maximize their consumer surplus
- However:
a. Some customers choose a flate rate, although they would pay less with a linear tariff (given the same number of articles).
b. Other customers prefer a linear tariff, although they would pay less with a flat rate.
Causes of
Causes of a flat rate bias:
a. Taxi meter effect
b. Self-control effect
c. Insurance effect
d. Habit effect
Causes of a Pay-per-use bias:
a. Flexibility effect
b. Habit effect
Implementation of Price Discrimination
- Avoid arbitrage, e.g.,
a. Exporting (discrimination by country)
b. Resale by the buyers (nonlinear pricing) - Measurement of willingness-to-pay at the individual level (nonlinear pricing: for different numbers of units)
- Optimization
- Communication
- Competitive reactions
- Legal aspects
Methods for Measuring Individual Willingness to pay
- Transaction Data:
a. Actual market transactions
b. Simulated test markets - Survey Data / Auctions / Lotteries:
Direct Elicitation
a. Open Ended: „How much are you willing to pay for product X? _______ €“
b. Closed Ended: „ Would you buy product X at the following prices?
i. 2.00 € yes/no
ii. 2.50 € yes/no
iii. 3.00 € yes/no
iv. …
c. Problems:
i. Difficult to state WTP directly (easier to trade-off with other product attributes)
ii. Hypothetical bias