Price Discrimination Based on Buyers’ Purchase History

Arieh Gavious, Ella Segev

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

We consider a repeated sales situation in which a seller sells one unit of a good each period to the same buyer. Having incomplete information about the buyer’s valuation, the seller responds to the buyer’s behavior, meaning, whether she bought previous units and at what price. We characterize the equilibrium of the no-commitment game for a uniform distribution and show that the seller discriminates between buyers based on their purchase history. Moreover, we show that the buyer’s ex-ante expected payoff is higher in the no-commitment game than in a game in which the seller can commit in advance to the prices he will charge (the commitment game). We also demonstrate that the buyer’s ex-post payoff is higher for each type of buyer in the no-commitment game. Social welfare is also higher in the no-commitment game. As the number of periods (units) increases, the opening prices decline, but fewer types of buyers accept the opening price.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)229-265
Number of pages37
JournalDynamic Games and Applications
Volume7
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Jun 2017

Keywords

  • Incomplete information
  • Price discrimination
  • Purchase history

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Statistics and Probability
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design
  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Computational Mathematics
  • Applied Mathematics

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