Opaque selling

Simon Anderson and Levent Celik

Information Economics and Policy, 2020, vol. 52, issue C

Abstract: We study “opaque” selling in multiproduct environments – a marketing practice in which sellers strategically withhold product information by keeping important characteristics of their products hidden until after purchase. We show that a monopolist will always use opaque selling, but it is not first-best optimal to do so. However, opaque selling might be used at the constrained optimum (with the monopolist’s pricing behavior taken as given). For linear disutility costs, it is optimal for a monopolist to offer a single opaque product.

Keywords: Opaque products; Product line design; Product differentiation; Price discrimination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L12 L13 L15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167624519300988
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:iepoli:v:52:y:2020:i:c:s0167624519300988

DOI: 10.1016/j.infoecopol.2020.100869

Access Statistics for this article

Information Economics and Policy is currently edited by D. Waterman

More articles in Information Economics and Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu (repec@elsevier.com).