We study optimal pricing in the presence of recommender systems. A recommender system affects the market in two ways: (i) it creates value by reducing product uncertainty for the customers and hence (ii) its recommendations can be offered as add-ons which generate informational externalities. The quality of the recommendation add-on is endogenously determined by sales. We investigate the impact of these factors on the optimal pricing by a seller with a recommender system against a competitive fringe without such a system. If the recommender system is sufficiently effective in reducing uncertainty, then the seller prices otherwise symmetric products differently to have some products experienced more aggressively. Moreover, the seller segments the market so that customers with more inflexible tastes pay higher prices to get better recommendations.
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Length: 12 pages Date of creation: Mar 2006 Date of revision: Publication status: Published in Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, Ann Arbor, MI, 2006, pp. 43-51 Handle: RePEc:cwl:cwldpp:1563
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Christopher Avery & Paul Resnick & Richard Zeckhauser, 1999.
"The Market for Evaluations,"
American Economic Review,
American Economic Association, vol. 89(3), pages 564-584, June.
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