Footnote:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments February 1, 2017 erstellt
Description:
This paper studies a firm's optimal dynamic pricing strategies for its new experience goods inmarkets where the distribution of consumers' valuations is ex ante unknown. We examine whetherand how the firm facing information asymmetry and demand uncertainty can signal its high qualityand learn market demand through its pricing strategy. First, we find that a high-quality firm cancredibly reveal its true quality in the early period with either a skimming-pricing strategy or apenetration-pricing strategy under different conditions. Second, though a high-quality firm canbenefit more from learning market demand than a low-quality firm, the high-quality firm may inequilibrium adopt a penetration-pricing strategy to forgo the benefit of learning demand in orderto separate from the low-quality firm, who would adopt a skimming strategy to learn marketdemand. Third, although consumers have higher willing-to-pay for a high-quality product, thehigh-quality firm may in equilibrium charge a lower initial price than the low-quality firm. Fourth,interestingly, the high-quality firm may earn higher profits when its initial price is made underdemand uncertainty than under no uncertainty. Lastly, with perfect social learning (i.e., in the laterperiod, all consumers can learn the firm's quality from earlier customers), the high-quality firmcan in equilibrium signal its quality and learn market demand by adopting a skimming strategy