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Pricing Damaged Goods

Author

Listed:
  • McAfee, R. Preston

Abstract

Companies with market power occasionally engage in intentional quality reduction of a portion of their output as a means of offering two qualities of goods for the purpose of price discrimination, even absent a cost saving. This paper provides an exact characterization in terms of marginal revenues of when such a strategy is profitable, which, remarkably, does not depend on the distribution of customer valuations, but only on the value of the damaged product relative to the undamaged product. In particular, when the damaged product provides a constant proportion of the value of the full product, selling a damaged good is unprofitable. One quality reduction produces higher profits than another if the former has higher marginal revenue than the latter.

Suggested Citation

  • McAfee, R. Preston, 2007. "Pricing Damaged Goods," Economics Discussion Papers 2007-2, Kiel Institute for the World Economy.
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:ifwedp:5516
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    Cited by:

    1. Vo, Mike, 2025. "When to degrade a product: The utility-to-cost ratio rule," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 255(C).
    2. Philipp Afèche & J. Michael Pavlin, 2016. "Optimal Price/Lead-Time Menus for Queues with Customer Choice: Segmentation, Pooling, and Strategic Delay," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 62(8), pages 2412-2436, August.
    3. Lachapelle, A. & Santambrogio, F., 2011. "On the strategic use of risk and undesirable goods in multidimensional screening," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 47(6), pages 698-705.
    4. Turunç Ömer & Karayalçın Cem, 2024. "Bridging Brand Parity with Insights Regarding Consumer Behavior," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment Journal, De Gruyter, vol. 18(1), pages 1-10, January.
    5. Eric T. Anderson & James D. Dana, Jr., 2009. "When Is Price Discrimination Profitable?," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 55(6), pages 980-989, June.
    6. Belleflamme,Paul & Peitz,Martin, 2015. "Industrial Organization," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9781107069978, November.
    7. Costis Maglaras & John Yao & Assaf Zeevi, 2018. "Optimal Price and Delay Differentiation in Large-Scale Queueing Systems," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 64(5), pages 2427-2444, May.
    8. Carlotta Mariotto & Marianne Verdier, 2020. "Platform–merchant competition for sales services," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 29(4), pages 834-853, October.
    9. Roy Jones & Haim Mendelson, 2011. "Information Goods vs. Industrial Goods: Cost Structure and Competition," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 57(1), pages 164-176, January.
    10. McCalman, Phillip, 2010. "Trade policy in a "super size me" world," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 81(2), pages 206-218, July.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • L15 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Information and Product Quality
    • D43 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection

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