Behavioral Price Discrimination in the Presence of Switching Costs

We study the strategic impacts of behavioral price discrimination (BPD) on manufacturers and retailers in a distribution channel when there are switching costs in consumer demand. Unlike previous empirical studies of behavioral price discrimination, which rely only on differences in price elasticity across customers, our pricing model allows the firm strategies to additionally account for differences in price elasticity across time (due to switching costs). We estimate a dynamic pricing model using empirical data from the cola category and, through a series of counterfactuals, we find that the retailer should simply outsource the data analytics and customization of coupons to manufacturers and improve its profit beyond what it can achieve by proactively couponing on its own. We further find that serving as an information broker to sell its customer database to manufacturers can be a vital source of profit to the retailer. By contrast, manufacturers end up worse off, illustrating that customer information is a potent source of channel power to the retailer. Finally, we show that simply using customers’ most recent purchase information can significantly impact firms’ profits. BPD based on this information is easy to implement and of low cost to manufacturers and retailers. Data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2016.1024 .