Tommy Staahl Gabrielsen

Consumer heterogeneity, incomplete information and pricing in a duopoly with switching costs

Abstract It is well known that switching costs may facilitate monopoly pricing in a market with price competition between two suppliers of a homogenous good, provided the switching cost is above some critical level. With heterogeneous consumers and incomplete information about individual consumers’ types, monopoly pricing entails second-degree price discrimination with inefficient contracts for low demand types. We show that introducing consumer heterogeneity may increase the critical switching cost needed to sustain a pure-strategy equilibrium involving monopoly pricing.

Exclusive versus Common Dealership

In a setting with two differentiated producers and identical retailers, we analyzed whether the producers will have a distribution system with one or several retailers. In contrast to the existing literature, we allow for full foreclosure under both types of distribution systems. We find, in contrast to what has been shown in the received literature, that the producers will prefer a distribution system with a single common retailer to a system with separate exclusive dealers.

The foreclosure argument for exclusive dealing: The case of differentiated retailers

I analyze a cooperative characteristic-form game between two differentiated producers and a downstream retail sector. When there is a single downstream retailer, the game always has a nonempty Core, involving the retailer being a common dealer. Each producer can at most earn his increment to the collusive industry profit. This result is similar to what is obtained in the literature in an extensive-form noncooperative formulation of the game. When there are two differentiated downstream retailers, the Core is empty when products and retailers are too homogeneous. For sufficient product and retailer differentiation, the Core is nonempty. In these cases the retailers are always common dealers for both products.