Pay What You Want (PWYW) can be an attractive marketing strategy to price discriminate between fair-minded and selfish customers, to fully penetrate a market without giving away the product for free, and to undercut competitors that use posted prices. We report on laboratory experiments that...

This paper investigates the strategies of a data broker in selling information to one or to two competing firms that can price-discriminate consumers. The data broker can strategically choose any segment of the consumer demand (information structure) to sell to firms that implement third-degree...

In this study, we investigate behavioral constraints on pricing by using a novel laboratory experiment in which actual consumption goods are traded. We test different models and provide several insights into pricing and reactions to price discrimination. First, we identify the extent to which...

We provide an explanation for a frequently observed vertical restraint in ecommerce, namely that brand manufacturers partially or completely prohibit that retailers distribute their high-quality products over the internet. Our analysis is based on the assumption that a consumer's purchasing...

Equilibrium prices behave quite differently if consumers single-purchase (buy either Time Magazine or Newsweek) or if some consumers multi-purchase (buy both). Prices are strategic complements under single-purchase, and increase with magazine quality. In a multi-purchase regime prices are...

Museums have many different goals beyond efficiency such as social equity, financial revenue, attracting donors and gaining international, regional or local prestige. Various pricing schemes are being discussed with the aim of reaching these goals. The classical ones are entry prices and free...

This paper analyzes persuasive advertising and pricing in oligopoly if firms sell differentiated products and consumers have heterogeneous social attitudes towards the consumption by others. Deriving product demand from primitives, we show that the demand-enhancing effect of persuasive...

We revisit the classical result that financing a pure public good through taxation of private consumption is inefficient. To this standard setup we add a consumption contest in which consumers can win a prize. We show that an appropriately chosen contest — which we call a ‘tax lottery' —...

We consider a simple two period model where consumers have different switching costs. Before the market opens, there was an incumbent who sold to all consumers. We identify the equilibrium both with Stackelberg and Bertrand competition and show how the presence of low switching cost consumers...

We study implications of habit formation for optimal taxation. First, we show that taxation problems with habit formation can be analyzed using dynamic programming techniques. Second, we derive optimal labor and savings wedges for habit formation preferences. We show that habit formation...