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The Power of Opaque Products in Pricing

Author

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  • Adam N. Elmachtoub

    (Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027)

  • Michael L. Hamilton

    (Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260)

Abstract

We study the power of selling opaque products, that is, products where a feature (such as color) is hidden from the customer until after purchase. Opaque products, which are sold with a price discount, have emerged as a powerful vehicle to increase revenue for many online retailers and service providers that offer horizontally differentiated items. In the opaque selling models we consider, all of the items are sold at a single common price alongside opaque products that may correspond to various subsets of the items. We consider two types of customers, risk-neutral ones, who assume they will receive a truly random item of the opaque product, and pessimistic ones, who assume they will receive their least favorite item of the opaque product. We benchmark opaque selling against two common selling strategies: discriminatory pricing, where one explicitly charges different prices for each item, and single pricing, where a single price is charged for all the items. We give a sharp characterization of when opaque selling outperforms discriminatory pricing; namely, this result holds for situations where all customers are pessimistic or the item valuations are supported on two points. In the latter case, we also show that opaque selling with just one opaque product guarantees at least 71.9% of the revenue from discriminatory pricing. We then provide upper bounds on the potential revenue increase from opaque selling strategies over single pricing and describe cases where the increase can be significantly more than that of discriminatory pricing. Finally, we provide pricing algorithms and conduct an extensive numerical study to assess the power of opaque selling for a variety valuation distributions and model extensions.

Suggested Citation

  • Adam N. Elmachtoub & Michael L. Hamilton, 2021. "The Power of Opaque Products in Pricing," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 67(8), pages 4686-4702, August.
  • Handle: RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:67:y:2021:i:8:p:4686-4702
    DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2020.3750
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    3. Ben Li & Xiaolong Guo & Liang Liang, 2024. "Optimal pricing decision and capacity allocation of opaque selling in airline revenue management," Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 23(4), pages 356-368, August.
    4. Daniel Freund & S'ebastien Martin & Jiayu Kamessi Zhao, 2024. "Two-Sided Flexibility in Platforms," Papers 2404.04709, arXiv.org.
    5. Shixin Wang, 2023. "The Power of Simple Menus in Robust Selling Mechanisms," Papers 2310.17392, arXiv.org, revised Sep 2024.
    6. Guo, Xiaolong & Bian, Junsong & Wu, Peiyan & Shi, Victor & Chen, Huangen, 2023. "Probabilistic product design with regret-anticipated consumers," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 263(C).

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