Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP15969
Authors: Laura Doval; Vasiliki Skreta
Abstract: Product personalization opens the door to price discrimination. A rich product line allows for higher consumer satisfaction, but the mere choice of a product carries valuable information about the consumer that the firm can leverage for price discrimination. Controlling the degree of product personalization provides the firm with an additional tool to curb ratcheting forces arising from consumers’ awareness of being price discriminated. Indeed, a firm's inability to not engage in price discrimination introduces a novel distortion: The firm offers a subset of the products that it would offer if, instead, the firm could commit to not price discriminate. Doing so gives commitment power to the firm: By ‘pooling’ consumers with different tastes to the same variety the firm commits not to learn their tastes.
Keywords: product line design; price discrimination; dynamic mechanism design; information design; limited commitment
JEL Codes: D84; D86; L12; L13; L15
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Product personalization (X) (C91) | Price discrimination (Y) (D40) |
| Limited commitment (Z) (D80) | Distorted product offerings (W) (L15) |
| Limited commitment (Z) (D80) | Price discrimination (Y) (D40) |
| Product personalization (X) (C91) | Distorted product offerings (W) (L15) |