Product Recommendations and Price Parity Clauses

Martin Peitz and Anton Sobolev

No 19659, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: A seller can offer an experience good directly to consumers and indirectly through an intermediary. When selling indirectly, the intermediary provides recommendations based on the consumer’s match value and the prices at which the product is sold. The intermediary faces the trade-off between extracting rents from consumers who strongly care about the match value versus providing less informative recommendations but also serving consumers who do not. We analyze the allocative and welfare effects of prohibiting price parity clauses and/or regulating the intermediary’s recommender system. Prohibiting price parity clauses is always welfare decreasing in our model.

Keywords: E-commerce (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D21 D42 L12 L15 M37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-11
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP19659 (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:cpr:ceprdp:19659

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP19659

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().