IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/car/carecp/22-02.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

A Theory of Partitioned Pricing

Author

Abstract

Partitioned pricing is a common pricing practice that divides the price of a product into a base price and one or more mandatory surcharges. From the perspective of standard economic theory, this practice is puzzling because rational buyers care about the full price they pay for a product rather than whether and how the price is partitioned into various components. This paper develops a theory of partitioned pricing using a duopoly model where the owner of each firm determines the level of surcharge but delegates the setting of base price to a manager. It shows that in equilibrium both firms choose partitioned pricing over conventional all-inclusive pricing. Moreover, partitioned pricing leads to higher full prices and larger profits than all-inclusive pricing. Most surprisingly, collusion on surcharge without any coordination on base price is as profitable as collusion on all-inclusive price.

Suggested Citation

  • Zhiqi Chen, 2022. "A Theory of Partitioned Pricing," Carleton Economic Papers 22-02, Carleton University, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:car:carecp:22-02
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://carleton.ca/economics/wp-content/uploads/cewp22-02.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    partitioned pricing; surcharges; duopoly; strategic delegation; collusion;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • L11 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Production, Pricing, and Market Structure; Size Distribution of Firms
    • L22 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Firm Organization and Market Structure
    • L41 - Industrial Organization - - Antitrust Issues and Policies - - - Monopolization; Horizontal Anticompetitive Practices

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:car:carecp:22-02. 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: Court Lindsay (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    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.