Bundling Variety, Usage, or Both? A Multi-Service Analysis of Pay-Per-Use and Subscription Pricing
研究将产品捆绑与按次付费和订阅两种定价方案结合，分析多单位需求下捆绑多样性（品种）和使用量对定价策略的影响，发现按次付费时单品销售优于纯捆绑，订阅时则相反。
We depart from the classic bundling literature on single-unit purchases and develop a multi-unit demand model in which customers decide both the variety and volume of their purchased products. We integrate product bundling with two commonly used usage-based pricing schemes in the service industry, pay-per-use and subscriptions, and examine pricing tactics that span both variety and usage. Our model captures customers’ diminishing margins of consumption, and we demonstrate an intricate interplay between product variety and usage that enriches existing results on the dominance of pure bundling over component selling in the classic single-unit demand model. Specifically, with multi-unit demands, component selling can outperform pure bundling under pay-per-use, whereas the reversal is true under subscriptions. We also analyze mixed bundling (on either variety or usage) and nonlinear pricing, and demonstrate how to leverage these more advanced pricing schemes for better revenues. Our results provide novel insights into firms’ bundling strategies jointly on variety and usage. Collectively, they highlight the critical role of the customer demand model (single-unit vs. multi-unit) in driving monopoly firms’ strategic choice of product (un)bundling.