Optimal price skimming by a monopolist facing rational consumers
Management Science
Customer Loyalty and Supplier Quality Competition
Management Science
Asymmetric Consumer Learning and Inventory Competition
Management Science
Intertemporal Pricing with Strategic Customer Behavior
Management Science
Strategic Capacity Rationing to Induce Early Purchases
Management Science
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Optimal Pricing of Seasonal Products in the Presence of Forward-Looking Consumers
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Dynamic Pricing Strategies with Reference Effects
Operations Research
Dynamic Pricing with Loss-Averse Consumers and Peak-End Anchoring
Operations Research
Capacity Planning in the Semiconductor Industry: Dual-Mode Procurement with Options
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Markdown Pricing with Unknown Fraction of Strategic Customers
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Double moral hazard in a supply chain with consumer learning
Decision Support Systems
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Consider a firm that sells products over repeated seasons, each of which includes a full-price period and a markdown period. The firm may deliberately understock products in the markdown period to induce high-value customers to purchase early at full price. Customers cannot perfectly anticipate availability. Instead, they use observed past capacities to form capacity expectations according to a heuristic smoothing rule. Based on their expectations of capacity, customers decide to buy either in the full-price period or in the markdown period. We embed this customer learning process in a dynamic program of the firm's capacity choices over time. One main result demonstrates the existence of a monotone optimal path of customers' expectations, which converges to either a rationing equilibrium or a low-price-only equilibrium. Further, there exists a critical value of capacity expectation such that the market converges to a rationing equilibrium if customers' initial expectations are less than that critical value; otherwise, a low-price-only equilibrium is the limiting outcome. These results show how firms can be stuck with unprofitable selling strategies from incumbent customer expectations. We also examine numerically how this critical value is affected by the firm's discount factor and customers' learning speed and risk aversion. Last, we show that the equilibrium under adaptive learning converges to that under rational expectations as the firm's discount factor approaches one.