Behavior-Based Price Discrimination with Experience Goods

Abstract

This paper examines the profitability of behavior-based price discrimination (BBPD) by duopolists producing horizontally differentiated experience goods. Considering a three-stage game in which the firms first make price discrimination decisions followed by two-stage pricing decisions, the two main results we obtain are the following: (i) if consumers underestimate the quality of the products at a level that is not very low, there are two subgame perfect Nash equilibria where both firms do not collect information about consumers' purchase histories so that neither firm price discriminates and where both firms collect consumer information to practice BBPD; (ii) BBPD is more profitable than uniform pricing if consumers overestimate at a more than moderate level.