Price and Quality Optimization with the Intertemporal Reference Price Effect

When making purchasing decisions for a certain product, consumers normally take the historical price as a reference. Focusing on the intertemporal reference price effect (IRPE), this study investigates the joint optimization problem of price and quality from a new product releaser's perspective. More specifically, we establish a choice model based on the multinomial logit model to deal with consumers' behaviour when facing a newly released product and an existing alternative. Our analyses start from a short-term case, where the optimization is only about determining the best price, and then move to a long-term case, in which the firm can adjust both the price and quality. The consumers' attitudes toward the IRPE are examined respectively in the asymmetric format