scholarly journals Transparency of Behavior-Based Pricing

2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xi Li ◽  
Krista J. Li ◽  
Xin (Shane) Wang
Keyword(s):  
Social Welfare ◽  
Consumer Surplus ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
History Data ◽  
Consumer Data ◽  
Behavior Based ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Firm Profit ◽  
Commitment Device

Behavior-based pricing (BBP) refers to the practice in which firms collect consumers’ purchase history data, recognize repeat and new consumers from the data, and offer them different prices. This is a prevalent practice for firms and a worldwide concern for consumers. Extant research has examined BBP under the assumption that consumers observe firms’ practice of BBP. However, consumers do not know that specific firms are doing this and are often unaware of how firms collect and use their data. In this article, the authors examine (1) how firms make BBP decisions when consumers do not observe whether firms perform BBP and (2) how the transparency of firms’ BBP practice affects firms and consumers. They find that when consumers do not observe firms’ practice of BBP and the cost of implementing BBP is low, a firm indeed practices BBP, even though BBP is a dominated strategy when consumers observe it. When the cost is moderate, the firm does not use BBP; however, it must distort its first-period price downward to signal and convince consumers of its choice. A high cost of implementing BBP serves as a commitment device that the firm will forfeit BBP, thereby improving firm profit. By comparing regimes in which consumers do and do not observe a firm’s practice of BBP, the authors find that transparency of BBP increases firm profit but decreases consumer surplus and social welfare. Therefore, requiring firms to disclose collection and usage of consumer data could hurt consumers and lead to unintended consequences.

Quality Disclosure Under Consumer Loss Aversion

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jianqiang Zhang ◽  
Krista J. Li
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Loss Aversion ◽  
Consumer Surplus ◽  
Quality Disclosure ◽  
Disclosure Decisions ◽  
Future Outcomes ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Firm Profit ◽  
First Mover

Consumers experience a sense of loss when a product’s quality does not match their expectations. To alleviate consumer loss aversion (CLA), firms can disclose information to reduce consumers’ uncertainty about product quality and the resulting psychological loss. In this paper, we investigate the implications of CLA on firm profit, consumer surplus, and social welfare when firms endogenously make quality disclosure decisions. We find that CLA leads symmetric firms to disclose quality more often. Given that CLA weakly reduces consumers’ utility from buying a product and quality disclosure is costly, intuition suggests that CLA is detrimental to firms. We find that this intuition is true only in a monopoly. Surprisingly, CLA makes both firms in a competition better off. Moreover, CLA increases firms’ profit when they invest in quality disclosure instead of money-back guarantees to respond to CLA. We also find that CLA decreases consumer surplus and social welfare. Therefore, educating consumers to improve decision-making skills by deliberating on future outcomes and emotions can benefit firms at the cost of consumers and society. When firms disclose quality sequentially, CLA can discourage the follower from disclosing quality. A strong level of CLA increases the leader’s profit over the follower’s, thereby encouraging firms to be the first mover in quality disclosure. This paper was accepted by Juanjuan Zhang, marketing.

The Consequences of Hiring Lower-Wage Workers in an Incomplete-Contract Environment

2014 ◽  
Vol 90 (3) ◽  
pp. 941-966 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason L. Brown ◽  
Patrick R. Martin ◽  
Donald V. Moser ◽  
Roberto A. Weber
Keyword(s):  
Social Welfare ◽  
Contract Design ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Hiring Practices ◽  
Incomplete Contract ◽  
Lower Wage ◽  
Firm Profit

ABSTRACT Firms frequently attempt to increase profits by replacing some existing workers with new lower-wage workers. However, this strategy may be ineffective in an incomplete-contract environment because the new workers may provide lower effort in response to their lower wages, and hiring new lower-wage workers may damage the remaining original workers' reciprocal relationship with the firm. We conduct an experiment to examine this issue and find that when new lower-wage workers become available, firms hire them to replace original higher-wage workers and pay the new workers lower wages. However, these lower wages do not improve firm profit because the decision to hire new lower-wage workers causes both the new and remaining workers to provide lower effort. Moreover, hiring lower-wage workers reduces new workers' payoffs and, thus, decreases social welfare. These unintended consequences suggest that firms should consider both the wage savings and the potential costs when deciding whether to replace some workers with new lower-wage workers. We discuss the implications of our findings for contract design, hiring practices, and managerial accountants.

The Value of Consumer Data in Online Advertising

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 269-289
Author(s):  
Marc Bourreau ◽  
Bernard Caillaud ◽  
Romain de Nijs
Keyword(s):  
Information Disclosure ◽  
Value Of Information ◽  
Online Advertising ◽  
Personal Data ◽  
Specific Information ◽  
Incremental Value ◽  
Imperfectly Competitive ◽  
Social Returns ◽  
Consumer Data ◽  
The Cost

Abstract In this paper we propose a model where consumer personal data have multidimensional characteristics, and are used by platforms to offer ad slots with better targeting possibilities to a market of differentiated advertisers through real-time auctions. A platform controls the amount of information about consumers that it discloses to advertisers, thereby affecting the dispersion of advertisers’ valuations for the slot. We first show by way of simulations that the amount of consumer-specific information that is optimally revealed to advertisers increases with the degree of competition on the advertising market and decreases with the cost of information disclosure for a monopolistic platform, competing platforms or a welfare-maximizing platform, provided the advertising market is not highly concentrated. Second, we exhibit different properties between the welfare-maximizing situation and the imperfectly competitive market situations with respect to how the incremental value of information varies: there are decreasing social returns to consumers’ data, while private returns may be increasing or decreasing locally.

scholarly journals Externalities and Regulation in Card Payment Systems

2006 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Charles Rochet ◽  
Jean Tirole
Keyword(s):  
Social Welfare ◽  
Consumer Surplus ◽  
Welfare Analysis ◽  
Payment Systems ◽  
Interchange Fees ◽  
Regulatory Approach ◽  
Innovative Thinking ◽  
Card Payment ◽  
Economic Thinking

The paper offers a roadmap to the current economic thinking concerning interchange fees. After describing the fundamental externalities inherent in payment systems and analysing merchant resistance to interchange fee increases and the associations' determination of this fee, it derives the externalities' implications for welfare analysis. It then discusses whether consumer surplus or social welfare is the proper benchmark for regulatory purposes. Finally, it offers a critique of the current regulatory approach, and concludes with a call for more novel and innovative thinking about how to reconcile regulators' concerns and the industry legitimate desire to perform its balancing act.

Unequal Treatment of Identical Agents in Cournot Equilibrium

1999 ◽  
Vol 89 (3) ◽  
pp. 585-604 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen W Salant ◽  
Greg Shaffer
Keyword(s):  
Marginal Cost ◽  
Consumer Surplus ◽  
Production Costs ◽  
Cournot Equilibrium ◽  
Unequal Treatment ◽  
Marginal Costs ◽  
Second Stage ◽  
Policy Debates ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Antitrust Regulation

Oligopoly models where prior actions by firms affect subsequent marginal costs have been useful in illuminating policy debates in areas such as antitrust regulation, environmental protection, and international competition. We discuss properties of such models when a Cournot equilibrium occurs at the second stage. Aggregate production costs strictly decline with no change in gross revenue or gross consumer surplus if the prior actions strictly increase the variance of marginal costs without changing the marginal-cost sum. Therefore, unless the cost of inducing second-stage asymmetry more than offsets this reduction in production costs, the private and social optima are asymmetric. (JEL D43, L13, L40)

scholarly journals Cooperative Trading Mechanism and Satisfaction-Based Profit Distribution in a Multi-Energy Community

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jian Wang ◽  
Ning Xie ◽  
Valentin Ilea ◽  
Cristian Bovo ◽  
Hao Xin ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Welfare ◽  
Energy System ◽  
Energy Integration ◽  
Profit Distribution ◽  
Energy Hub ◽  
Usage Patterns ◽  
Integrated Energy System ◽  
Trading Mechanism ◽  
Energy Community ◽  
The Cost

With the development of distributed generation and demand-side response, traditional consumers are now converted into prosumers that can actively produce and consume electricity. Moreover, with the help of energy integration technique, prosumers are encouraged to form a multi-energy community (MEC), which can increase their social welfare through inside multi-energy sharing. This paper proposes a day-ahead cooperative trading mechanism in a MEC that depends on an energy hub (EH) to couple electricity, natural gas, and heat for all prosumers. The model of the traditional uncooperative local integrated energy system (ULIES) is also built as a comparison. A satisfaction-based profit distribution mechanism is set according to prosumers’ feelings about the extra cost they save or extra profit they gain in MEC compared with that in ULIES. Finally, case studies are set to analyze the utility of MEC in enlarging social welfare, after considering the effects of prosumers’ electricity usage patterns and buy-and-sell prices in retail market. The results of satisfaction-based profit distribution are also analyzed to verify that it can save the cost or increase the profit of each prosumer and EH.

scholarly journals Social Welfare Analysis under Different Levels of Consumers’ Privacy Regulation

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (7) ◽  
pp. 2943-2964
Author(s):  
Xudong Lin ◽  
Xiaoli Huang ◽  
Shuilin Liu ◽  
Yulin Li ◽  
Hanyang Luo ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Welfare ◽  
Information Sharing ◽  
Privacy Protection ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Specific Information ◽  
Privacy Regulation ◽  
Privacy Preference ◽  
The Cost ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Different Levels

With the rapid development of information technology, digital platforms can collect, utilize, and share large amounts of specific information of consumers. However, these behaviors may endanger information security, thus causing privacy concerns among consumers. Considering the information sharing among firms, this paper constructs a two-period duopoly price competition Hotelling model, and gives insight into the impact of three different levels of privacy regulations on industry profit, consumer surplus, and social welfare. The results show that strong privacy protection does not necessarily make consumers better off, and weak privacy protection does not necessarily hurt consumers. Information sharing among firms will lead to strong competitive effects, which will prompt firms to lower the price for new customers, thus damaging the profits of firms, and making consumers’ surplus higher. The level of social welfare under different privacy regulations depends on consumers’ product-privacy preference, and the cost of information coordination among firms. With the cost of information coordination among firms increasing, it is only in areas where consumers have greater privacy preferences that social welfare may be optimal under the weak regulation.

Endogenous Timing in Vertically-Related Markets

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hong-Ren Din ◽  
Chia-Hung Sun
Keyword(s):  
Social Welfare ◽  
Price Competition ◽  
Consumer Surplus ◽  
The Other ◽  
Endogenous Timing ◽  
Price Strategy ◽  
Quantity Competition ◽  
Sequential Game ◽  
Product Substitutability

Abstract This paper investigates the theory of endogenous timing by taking into account a vertically-related market where an integrated firm competes with a downstream firm. Contrary to the standard results in the literature, we find that both firms play a sequential game in quantity competition and play a simultaneous game in price competition. Under mixed quantity-price competition, the firm choosing a price strategy moves first and the other firm choosing a quantity strategy moves later in equilibrium. Given that the timing of choosing actions is determined endogenously, aggregate profit (consumer surplus) is higher (lower) under price competition than under quantity competition. Lastly, social welfare is higher under quantity competition than under price competition when the degree of product substitutability is relatively low.

A Model of Queue Scalping

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luyi Yang ◽  
Zhongbin Wang ◽  
Shiliang Cui
Keyword(s):  
Social Welfare ◽  
Service Provider ◽  
Operations Management ◽  
Consumer Surplus ◽  
System Throughput ◽  
Theoretic Model ◽  
Material Interest ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Short Run ◽  
Primary Service

Recent years have witnessed the rise of queue scalping in congestion-prone service systems. A queue scalper has no material interest in the primary service but proactively enters the queue in hopes of selling his spot later. This paper develops a queueing-game-theoretic model of queue scalping and generates the following insights. First, we find that queues with either a very small or very large demand volume may be immune to scalping, whereas queues with a nonextreme demand volume may attract the most scalpers. Second, in the short run, when capacity is fixed, the presence of queue scalping often increases social welfare and can increase or reduce system throughput, but it tends to reduce consumer surplus. Third, in the long run, the presence of queue scalping motivates a welfare-maximizing service provider to adjust capacity using a “pull-to-center” rule, increasing (respectively, reducing) capacity if the original capacity level is low (respectively, high). When the service provider responds by expanding capacity, the presence of queue scalping can increase social welfare, system throughput, and even consumer surplus in the long run, reversing its short-run detrimental effect on customers. Despite these potential benefits, such capacity expansion does little to mitigate scalping and may only generate more scalpers in the queue. Finally, we compare and contrast queue scalping with other common mechanisms in practice—namely, (centralized) pay-for-priority, line sitting, and callbacks. This paper was accepted by Victor Martínez de Albéniz, operations management.

STORE PROMOTION, MANUFACTURER COMPETITION AND WELFARE

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
HAO WANG ◽  
XUNDONG YIN ◽  
ALICE Y. OUYANG
Keyword(s):  
Social Welfare ◽  
Consumer Preferences ◽  
Consumer Surplus ◽  
Weighted Average ◽  
Brand Name ◽  
Price Distortion ◽  
Online Platforms ◽  
Brand Competition ◽  
The Social ◽  
Partial Exclusion

This study evaluates the partial exclusion effects of store promotion. We find that a manufacturer with a better brand name has a higher willingness-to-pay for promotion services offered by retail stores or online platforms. The promotion results in higher sales-weighted average prices (wholesale and retail) and a larger inter-brand price gap. The stores or platforms extract more profits from manufacturers and consumers through the promotion services. The effects on consumer surplus and social welfare depend on whether the promotion alters consumer preferences. If it does, more consumers would be choosing their less-preferred brands because of the larger inter-brand price gap, which would be socially inefficient. If it does not, the promotion may help to correct the price distortion, but the social welfare effect is positive only when the promotion effect is small enough. In both cases, the promotion services reduce the total consumer surplus by softening inter-brand competition.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document