Competitive Bundling

Jidong Zhou ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper proposes a model of competitive bundling with an arbitrary number of firms. In the regime of pure bundling, we find that relative to separate sales pure bundling tends to raise market prices, benefit firms, and harm consumers when the number of firms is above a threshold. This is in contrast to the findings in the duopoly case on which the existing literature often focuses. Our analysis also sheds new light on how consumer valuation dispersion affects price competition more generally. In the regime of mixed bundling, having more than two firms raises new challenges in solving the model. We derive the equilibrium pricing conditions and show that when the number of firms is large, the equilibrium prices have simple approximations and mixed bundling is generally pro-competitive relative to separate sales. Firms' incentives to bundle are also investigated.

Keywords: bundling; multiproduct pricing; product compatibility; oligopoly (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D43 L13 L15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-12-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-ind, nep-mic and nep-mkt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:68358

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