Common in personal selling markets, price negotiation can be seen as “friction” for both customers and companies—but fixed pricing is not necessarily the answer. Haggling is a sales tool that often serves to close the deal. Removing it risks sales losses that offset the intended gains from price transparency.
Uses a synthetic difference-in-differences analysis to determine how adopting a fixed-pricing policy for one auto model affects negotiated prices and sales of other models.
Advertisers bid for online ads based on demographics and other data provided by publishers. Granular data can improve ad matching but also reduce publishers’ revenues by reducing bids for specific inventory. Both parties can benefit from auctions with mixed bundles of inventory types that broaden competition but also improve targeting.
Proposes a mechanism for online ad auctions that bundles inventory types to broaden competitive bidding and increase publisher revenues while also improving targeting and advertiser welfare.
Controlling the size of food portions can reduce overconsumption and waste, but size is in the eye of the beholder. Increasing the number of portions and the separation among them increases total perceived size. Such segmentation can reinforce social norms about appropriate portion size and increase consumer willingness to pay.
Conducts a series of online and in-person experiments to determine how segmenting food portions affects perceptions of total size, controlling for the number and arrangement of segments and the mental effort required to recombine them.
The Pareto rule (20% of customers account for 80% of revenue) tempts companies to focus on premium services. However, perceiving these offerings as zero-sum and thus unfair can diminish the appeal of basic offerings for non-premium customers. Companies can mitigate backlash by promoting premium offerings that subsidize services for all.
Conducts a series of online studies to understand why some consumers may see premium offers as zero-sum and unfair, eroding their loyalty and interest in basic services.