Price Discrimination by Negotiation: a Field Experiment in Retail Electricity
通过实地实验，研究零售电力市场中谈判导致的价格歧视，发现低收入消费者支付更高价格并非由于歧视性定价，而是其搜索和谈判意愿与能力的差异。
Abstract We use a field experiment to study price discrimination in a market with price posting and negotiation. Motivated by concerns that low-income consumers do poorly in markets with privately negotiated prices, we built a call center staffed with actors armed with bargaining scripts to reveal negotiated prices and their determinants. Our actors implement sequential bargaining games under incomplete information in the field. By experimentally manipulating how information is revealed, we generate sequences of price offers that allow us to identify price discrimination in negotiations based on retailer perceptions of consumers’ search and switching costs. We also document differences in price distributions between entrants and incumbents, reflecting differences in captivity of their respective consumer bases. Finally, we show that higher prices paid by lower-income subsidy recipients in our market is not due to discriminatory targeting; they can be explained by variation in consumer willingness and ability to search and bargain.