IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/randje/v57y2026i1p78-102.html

Purchase History and Product Personalization

Author

Listed:
  • Laura Doval
  • Vasiliki Skreta

Abstract

Product personalization opens the door to price discrimination. A rich product line allows firms to better tailor products to consumers' tastes, but the mere choice of a product carries valuable information about consumers that can be leveraged for price discrimination. We study this trade‐off in an upstream ‐ downstream model, where a consumer buys a good of variable quality upstream, followed by an indivisible good downstream. The downstream firm's use of the consumer's purchase history for price discrimination introduces a novel distortion: The upstream firm offers a subset of the products that it would offer if, instead, it could jointly design its product line and downstream pricing. By controlling the degree of product personalization the upstream firm curbs ratcheting forces that result from the consumer facing downstream price discrimination.

Suggested Citation

  • Laura Doval & Vasiliki Skreta, 2026. "Purchase History and Product Personalization," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 57(1), pages 78-102, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:randje:v:57:y:2026:i:1:p:78-102
    DOI: 10.1111/1756-2171.70007
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/1756-2171.70007
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/1756-2171.70007?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:randje:v:57:y:2026:i:1:p:78-102. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/randdus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.