Pricing Damaged Goods

Randolph McAfee

No 2007-2, Economics Discussion Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel)

Abstract: Companies with market power occasionally engage in intentional quality reduction of a portion of their output as a means of offering two qualities of goods for the purpose of price discrimination, even absent a cost saving. This paper provides an exact characterization in terms of marginal revenues of when such a strategy is profitable, which, remarkably, does not depend on the distribution of customer valuations, but only on the value of the damaged product relative to the undamaged product. In particular, when the damaged product provides a constant proportion of the value of the full product, selling a damaged good is unprofitable. One quality reduction produces higher profits than another if the former has higher marginal revenue than the latter.

JEL-codes: D43 L15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic and nep-mkt
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.economics-ejournal.org/economics/discussionpapers/2007-2
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/17925/1/dp2007-2.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:ifwedp:5516

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Discussion Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().