Behavior-based pricing: an analysis of the impact of social interactions
研究消费者之间的社会互动如何影响企业基于行为的定价策略，发现社会互动会降低对新老客户的定价，但边际效用递减会提高定价，且企业采用基于行为的定价能获得更高利润，但会降低消费者剩余和社会福利。
New information technologies enable firms to identify customers and offer personalized pricing, while also facilitating extensive social interactions among consumers. Existing research mainly explores firms’ use of behaviour-based pricing (BBP) through information technology and ignores consumer behaviour. This paper expands on this by examining how consumers’ social interactions affect BBP. In a two-period game model, consumers derive additional utility in each period through social interactions with other consumers who purchase the same product. Customers who have socially interacted will experience diminishing marginal utility when they socially interact again. We find that social interaction lowers the price that firms charge to new and old customers, while diminishing marginal utility raises the price that firms charge to new and old customers, and overall promotes consumer switching. Firms will gain higher second-period profits by adopting BBP than by adopting uniform pricing when consumers exhibit social interaction. Prior research shows that BBP reduces firms’ total profits. In contrast, we find that when consumers exhibit social interaction, firms implementing BBP can achieve higher total profits, and this advantage increases with the levels of social interaction and diminishing marginal utility. However, implementing BBP reduces consumer surplus and ultimately leads to lower social welfare.