What the Past Tells About the Future: Historical Prices in the Durable Goods Market
研究了历史价格信息如何影响消费者购买决策和企业的动态定价策略，发现少量知情消费者能促使垄断者降低常规价格、增加促销频率，并对不知情消费者产生正向溢出效应。
We investigate how historical price information (e.g., accessed through price trackers) influences consumers’ purchase decisions and thus affects a firm’s dynamic pricing strategy. We first show that when consumers with heterogeneous tastes are not informed about historical prices, the monopolist charges a high regular price for most of the time and periodically holds low-price sales. Then we consider the case in which a small fraction of consumers (such as price tracker users) become informed of historical prices. At the new equilibrium, the monopolist lowers the regular price and advances sales, implying shorter price cycles, more frequent sales, and a positive spillover effect of price tracker users’ informational advantage on the rest of uninformed consumers. We conclude with a discussion of the impact of price trackers on firms and other relevant managerial implications of the model. This paper was accepted by Dmitri Kuksov, marketing. Funding: Y. Chen thanks the National Science Foundation of China [Grant 71972043] for the support. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4309 .