Essays on pricing strategies of a monopolist firm.

摘要

This dissertation studies the pricing strategies a monopolist may employ to maximize its profit in various scenarios. The monopolist's aim is to design contracts that induce each customer to self-select, i.e. reveal her true identity (high or low valuation for the monopolist's product) by her choice of the option offered.;Chapter 1 shows that when the monopolist faces customers who have different valuations for its product, bundling, a pricing mechanism wherein the monopolist offers a menu of price-quantity bundles and lets consumers select only from amongst these bundles, is successful in inducing self-selection amongst the customers. Bundling is more profitable than the benchmark menu of two-part tariffs, absent cost considerations. Social welfare may be higher or lower with bundling.;Chapter 2 considers the finite time horizon problem of a monopolist selling a durable good to discrete customer segments containing a finite number of customers with different valuations for its product. Each period, the monopolist incurs some cost in offering its product for sale. A region is identified over which the monopolist, when sufficiently patient, finds it optimal to ration the product at a high price initially and lower the price in the future. This rationing strategy yields higher profit than that arising from pre-committing to a time path of prices or from renting.;Chapter 3 analyzes a monopolist manufacturer's problem when it operates in a vertical market structure characterized by a downstream dominant retailer and a fringe of smaller retailers. Recent literature suggests that quantity discounts cannot be unambiguously preferred by the manufacturer to a menu of two-part tariffs in this framework. The relative performance of another pricing scheme, all-units discounts, is studied. All-units discounts refer to discounts that lower a retailer's wholesale price on every unit purchased when the retailer's purchases equal or exceed some quantity threshold chosen by the manufacturer. It is demonstrated that all-units discounts, which is a special case of a quantity discount schedule, results in a profit level for the manufacturer that is at least as high as, and, for some parameter values, strictly higher than the profit earned from a menu of two-part tariffs.