We offer a novel view of employee discounts and in kind compensation. In our theory, bundling perks and cash compensation allows a firm to extract information rents from employees who have private information about their preferences for the perk and about their outside opportunities. We show that in maximizing profit with heterogeneous workers, the firm creates different bundles of the perk and salary in response to different employee characteristics and marginal costs of the perk. Our key result is that strategic bundling can lead firms to provide perks even in the absence of any cost advantage over the outside market and to deviate from the standard marginal cost pricing rule. We study how this deviation depends upon the set of feasible contracts, upon the perk's marginal cost, and upon the correlation between the agents' preferences for the good and their reservation utilities.
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Paper provided by Queen's University, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number
1108.
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.:
Montgomery, Edward & Shaw, Kathryn & Benedict, Mary Ellen, 1992.
"Pensions and Wages: An Hedonic Price Theory Approach,"
International Economic Review,
Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 33(1), pages 111-28, February.
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