Customers at the online music label Magnatune can pay what they want for albums, as long as the payment is within a given price range ($5-$18). Magnatune recommends to pay $8, and on average customers paid $8.20 (Regner and Barria, 2009). We ran an online survey and collected responses from 227...

Sellers often discriminate heterogeneous consumers with just a few products. This paper proposes an explanation for such coarse screening, based on consumer loss aversion. In our model, a seller offers a menu of bundles before a consumer learns his willingness to pay, and the consumer...

This paper proposes a theory of price discrimination based on consumer loss aversion. A seller offers a menu of bundles before a consumer learns his willingness to pay, and the consumer experiences gain-loss utility with reference to his prior (rational) expectations about contingent...

Marketing research has traditionally focused on centralized brand-extension strategies where a brand expands its product offerings by controlling the design, production, marketing and sales of new products `in-house'. However, luxury brands frequently use `brand licensing' as a decentralized...

We consider a brand manufacturer who can offer, next to its high-quality product, also a decoy good and faces competition by a competitive fringe that produces low quality. We show that the brand manufacturer optimally provides a decoy good to boost the demand for its main product if consumers'...

Recent studies investigate policies motivating consumers to make an active choice as a way to protect unsophisticated consumers. We analyse the optimal timing of such choice-enhancing policies when a firm can strategically react to them. In our model, a firm provides an automatic enrolment or...

We consider a brand manufacturer who can offer, next to its high-quality product, also a decoy good and faces competition by a competitive fringe that produces low quality. We show that the brand manufacturer optimally provides a decoy good to boost the demand for its main product if consumers'...

This survey aims to provide an overview of recent developments in the industrial organization literature that explores the behavior of profit-maximizing firms facing consumers with reference-dependent preferences and loss aversion. We discuss the implications of loss aversion on the practice of...