Purchase History and Product Personalization
研究上游企业通过产品个性化程度控制下游价格歧视带来的扭曲，发现上游企业会减少产品种类以抑制消费者因面临下游歧视而产生的棘轮效应。
ABSTRACT Product personalization opens the door to price discrimination. A rich product line allows firms to better tailor products to consumers' tastes, but the mere choice of a product carries valuable information about consumers that can be leveraged for price discrimination. We study this trade‐off in an upstream ‐ downstream model, where a consumer buys a good of variable quality upstream, followed by an indivisible good downstream. The downstream firm's use of the consumer's purchase history for price discrimination introduces a novel distortion: The upstream firm offers a subset of the products that it would offer if, instead, it could jointly design its product line and downstream pricing. By controlling the degree of product personalization the upstream firm curbs ratcheting forces that result from the consumer facing downstream price discrimination.