Consumer benefits differ for changing product sizes in a specialty coffee market
Thursday, October 2, 2008 - 12:35
in Mathematics & Economics
When consumers hold private information about their tastes, companies can use nonlinear pricing as a screening mechanism to induce different types of customers to buy different products. Screening incentives may lead a firm to make a small version of its product "too small" in order to collect more profit from consumers who purchase the larger version. A study in the RAND Journal of Economics shows that firms distort the products.