We examine the impact of multiproduct nonlinear pricing on profit, consumer surplus and welfare in a duopoly. When consumers buy all their products from one firm (the one-stop shopping model), nonlinear pricing leads to higher profit and welfare, but often lower consumer surplus, than linear pricing. By contrast, in a unit-demand model where consumers may buy one product from one firm and another product from another firm, bundling generally acts to reduce profit and welfare and to boost consumer surplus. In a more general model where consumers may buy from more than one firm and where consumers have elastic demands for each product, nonlinear pricing has ambiguous effects. Compared with linear pricing, nonlinear pricing tends to raise profit but harm consumer surplus when: (i) demand is elastic, (ii) there is substantial product differentiation, (iii) there is substantial heterogeneity in consumer demand, (iv) consumers face substantial shopping costs when visiting more than one firm, and (v) a consumer`s brand preference for one product is strongly correlated with her brand preference for another product. Nonlinear pricing is more likely to lead to welfare gains when (i), (ii), (iv) and (v) hold, but (iii) does not.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by University of Oxford, Department of Economics in its series Economics Series Working Papers with number
281.
Find related papers by JEL classification: D43 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure and Pricing - - - Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection L13 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
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.:
Cited by: (explanations, 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.)