Product bundling: Impacts of product heterogeneity and risk considerations

Mehdi Sheikhzadeh and Ehsan Elahi

International Journal of Production Economics, 2013, vol. 144, issue 1, 209-222

Abstract: Bundling has been extensively studied in the literature and its benefits have been manifested through three perspectives of achieving better price discrimination, helping to save costs, and preserving the power for deterring a potential entrant. In this study, we examine two aspects of bundling which have not been studied before. We examine the impact of product heterogeneity on bundling decisions. We also address risk considerations in a bundling problem. Specifically, we consider a retailer who has the option of selling a bundle of two products (pure bundling policy), or selling the products separately (no-bundling policy). The retailer could also face a product selection problem for which we consider three scenarios of choosing two products with perfectly positively correlated, perfectly negatively correlated or independent reservation prices. We use a Mean–Variance approach to include retailer's risk through her profit variability when maximizing the expected value of profit. We characterize the conditions under which a policy or scenario performs better than the others under the influence of product heterogeneity and/or retailer's risk aversion. Among other findings, we show that optimal bundling price chosen by a risk-averse decision maker cannot be larger than the one chosen by a risk neutral decision maker.

Keywords: Product bundling; Risk analysis; Mean–Variance analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092552731300073X
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:proeco:v:144:y:2013:i:1:p:209-222

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpe.2013.02.006

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Production Economics is currently edited by Stefan Minner

More articles in International Journal of Production Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().