Nonlinear Pricing with Average-price Bias

Nonlinear Pricing with Average-price Bias
Author: David Martimort
Publisher:
Total Pages: 28
Release: 2019
Genre: Consumers
ISBN:

Empirical evidence suggests that consumers facing complex nonlinear pricing often make choices based on average (not marginal) prices. Given such behavior, we characterize a monopolist's optimal nonlinear price schedule. In contrast to the textbook setting, nonlinear prices designed for "average-price bias" distort consumption downward for consumers at the top, may produce efficient consumption for consumers at the bottom, and typically feature quantity premia rather than quantity discounts. These properties arise because the bias replaces consumer information rents with curvature rents. Whether or not a monopolist prefers consumers with average-price bias depends upon underlying preferences and costs.

Nonlinear Pricing

Nonlinear Pricing
Author: Robert B. Wilson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 446
Release: 1993
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780195115826

What do phone rates, frequent flyer programs, and railroad tariffs all have in common? They are all examples of nonlinear pricing. Pricing is nonlinear when it is not strictly proportional to the quantity purchased. The Electric Power Research Institute has commissioned Robert Wilson to review the various facets of nonlinear pricing. The work starts with a general non-mathematical discussion, followed by a more technical presentation intended for readers with a fairly advanced background. Thorough and detailed, this study has ample examples of case studies from a variety of industries.

Price Discrimination Using Linear and Nonlinear Pricing Simultaneously

Price Discrimination Using Linear and Nonlinear Pricing Simultaneously
Author: Babu Nahata
Publisher:
Total Pages: 8
Release: 2006
Genre:
ISBN:

Price discrimination practiced by using linear and nonlinear pricing simultaneously raises the average price for heterogenous consumers paying linear price but lowers for homogeneous group who pay nonlinear price. Discrimination lowers consumer surplus for both groups but increases total surplus.

Estimating Demand Elasticities Using Nonlinear Pricing

Estimating Demand Elasticities Using Nonlinear Pricing
Author: Christina Dalton
Publisher:
Total Pages: 47
Release: 2013
Genre:
ISBN:

Nonlinear pricing is prevalent in industries such as health care, public utilities, and telecommunications. However, nonlinear pricing in these sectors causes bias when estimating elasticities for welfare analysis or policy changes. This paper develops a local elasticity estimation method that takes advantage of nonlinear price schedules to isolate consumers' expenditure choices from selection and simultaneity biases. This method improves over previous approaches because it uses commonly-available observational data and requires a single general monotonicity assumption. Using detailed claims-level health insurance data with two nonlinearities, this paper measures declining elasticities from -0.26 to -0.09 along initial expenditure ranges, in contrast to previous work which aggregates over a skewed spending distribution. These estimates are then used to calculate moral hazard deadweight loss. This method enables estimation on many policies with nonlinear pricing which previous tools could not address.

An Empirical Analysis of Optimal Nonlinear Pricing

An Empirical Analysis of Optimal Nonlinear Pricing
Author: Soheil Ghili
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023
Genre:
ISBN:

In "continuous choice" settings, consumers decide not only on whether to purchase a product, but also on how much to purchase. As a result, firms should optimize a full price schedule rather than a single price point. This paper provides a methodology to empirically estimate the optimal schedule under multi-dimensional consumer heterogeneity. We apply our method to novel data from an educational-services firm that contains purchase-size information not only for deals that materialized, but also for potential deals that eventually failed. We show that the optimal second-degree price discrimination (i.e., optimal nonlinear tariff) improves the firm's profit upon linear pricing by about 7.9%. That said, this second-degree price discrimination scheme only recovers 7.4% of the gap between the profitability of linear pricing (i.e., no price discrimination) and that of infeasible first degree price discrimination. We also conduct several further counterfactual analyses (i) comparing the role of demand- v.s. cost-side factors in shaping the optimal price schedule, (ii) examining third-degree price discrimination, and (iii) empirically quantifying the magnitude by which incentive-compatibility constraints impact the optimal pricing and profits.

Nonlinear Pricing in Village Economies

Nonlinear Pricing in Village Economies
Author: Orazio P. Attanasio
Publisher:
Total Pages: 76
Release: 2015
Genre: Food prices
ISBN:

We propose a model of price discrimination to account for the nonlinearity of unit prices of basic food items in developing countries. We allow consumers to differ in their marginal willingness and absolute ability to pay for a good, incorporate consumers' subsistence constraints, and model consumers' outside options from purchasing a good, such as self-production or access to other markets, which depend on consumers' preferences and income. We obtain a simple characterization of equilibrium non-linear pricing and show that nonlinear pricing leads to higher levels of consumption and lower marginal prices than those implied by the standard nonlinear pricing model. The model is nonparametrically and semiparametrically identified under common assumptions. We derive nonparametric and semiparametric estimators of the model's primitives, which can easily be implemented using individual-level data commonly available for beneficiaries of conditional cash transfer programs in developing countries. The model well accounts for our data on rural Mexican villages. Importantly, the standard nonlinear pricing model, a special case of our model, is almost always rejected. We find that sellers have large degrees of market power and exert it by price discriminating across consumers through distortionary quantity discounts. Contrary to the prediction of the standard model, consumption distortions are less pronounced for individuals purchasing small quantities, despite the steep decline of observed unit prices with quantity. Overall, most consumers tend to benefit from nonlinear pricing relative to linear pricing. A novel result is that when sellers have market power, policies such as cash transfers that affect households' ability to pay can effectively strengthen sellers' incentive to price discriminate and thereby give rise to asymmetric price changes for low and high quantities, which exacerbate the consumption distortions associated with nonlinear pricing. We find evidence of these patterns in response to transfers in our data. These results confirm the importance of our proposed extension of the standard nonlinear pricing model in evaluating the distributional effects of nonlinear pricing.

Nonlinear Pricing

Nonlinear Pricing
Author: Electric Power Research Institute
Publisher:
Total Pages: 3
Release: 1992
Genre: Demand (Economic theory)
ISBN:

Nonlinear Pricing

Nonlinear Pricing
Author: Christopher T. May
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 392
Release: 1999-02-22
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780471245513

Die Chaostheorie erfreut sich in der Investmentbranche zwar großer Beliebtheit, aber bislang konnte niemand so recht sagen, wie man mit ihrer Hilfe Aktienkurse und Gewinne prognostizieren kann. Dieses Buch zeigt auf der Basis praktischer Methoden, daß Aktienkurse mit Hilfe der nichtlinearen Theorie zumindest teilweise vorhersehbar sind. Es wird anschaulich erläutert, wie verschiedene nichtlineare Techniken wie z.B. genetische Algorithmen, Fuzzy Logic und nichtlineare Dynamik anzuwenden sind. Hierbei läßt der Autor, der diese Methoden selbst gewinnbringend einsetzt, seine eigenen Erfahrungen mit einfließen. Das erste Buch zu diesem Thema, das reale, praxisnahe Anwendungen bietet. (01/99)