We present an information good pricing model with persistently heterogeneous consumers and a rising marginal propensity for them to pirate. Three offsetting pricing mechanisms occur: skimming, compressing price changes, and delaying product launch. We identify a novel trade off in piracy's...

Firms in many industries may obtain superior knowledge of customer preferences, whereas customers often need costly efforts to learn their match values. In this pa-per, we examine the optimal pricing strategies for a firm with superior knowledge, when customers can reduce information asymmetry...

This paper studies the role of loss-averse consumers' expectations about their future consumption in the pricing policy of a monopolistic firm in a dynamic setting. The firm offers a contract consisting of two units of service and the consumer makes two sequential consumption choices: to buy the...

This paper describes two new datasets available to academic researchers. The first is a panel dataset containing the transactions of 19,936 households made over the period from December 1998 to November 2004 at a major U.S. consumer electronics retailer. There are a total of 173,262...

Prices that end with 9, also known as psychological price points, are common, comprising about 70% of the retail prices. They are also more rigid than other prices. We take advantage of a natural experiment to document an emergence of a new price ending that has the same effects as 9-endings. In...

Prices that end with 9, also known as psychological price points, are common, comprising about 70% of the retail prices. They are also more rigid than other prices. We take advantage of a natural experiment to document an emergence of a new price ending that has the same effects as 9-endings. In...

This paper explores and quantifies the importance of parent brand state dependence to forward looking pricing outcomes in the area of umbrella branding and multi-product firms. We show through numerical simulations that loyalty (inertia) to the parent brand can decrease prices and reduce...

Looking at a large number of markets, I find that (i) prices and variety are higher when there are two competing supermarkets than in those with a single store and (ii) the two effects are positively correlated. This pattern persists after controlling for differences across markets in a variety...

Recent theories suggest that consumers' search efforts are a function of prices and prices changes, respectively. This may help to explain the 'rockets and feathers' phenomenon often assigned to collusion – prices rise like rockets when costs increase and fall like feathers when costs...