IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ceswps/_3698.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Contracts, Biases and Consumption of Access Services

Author

Listed:
  • Stephen G. Leider
  • Özge Sahin

Abstract

We consider a consumption model that takes into account the valuation and demand uncertainties that consumers face while using access services. Typical examples of such services include telecommunication services, extended warranties for consumer electronics, and club memberships. We demonstrate that consumption is affected by contract structure (pay-peruse vs. three part tariffs) even if the optimal consumption plans are identical. We find that a majority of individuals correctly use a threshold policy that is similar to a nearly optimal heuristic, however they use the free units too quickly leading to overconsumption and lost surplus. These errors are partially driven by mistaken beliefs about the value distribution. We also measure subjects’ willingness to pay for a contract with free access units, and we find that nearly half of subjects are willing to pay at least the full per-unit price, with a substantial fraction willing to overpay. The optimal firm strategy is therefore to offer a contract that presells access units at a very small discount; this strategy increases revenue by 8 − 15% compared to only offering a pay-per-use contract.

Suggested Citation

  • Stephen G. Leider & Özge Sahin, 2012. "Contracts, Biases and Consumption of Access Services," CESifo Working Paper Series 3698, CESifo.
    • Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_3698
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp3698.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. George Loewenstein & Ted O'Donoghue & Matthew Rabin, 2003. "Projection Bias in Predicting Future Utility," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 118(4), pages 1209-1248.
    2. Jean Tirole, 1988. "The Theory of Industrial Organization," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262200716, April.
    3. , & ,, 2008. "Consumer optimism and price discrimination," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 3(4), December.
    4. Esteban, Susanna & Miyagawa, Eiichi & Shum, Matthew, 2007. "Nonlinear pricing with self-control preferences," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 135(1), pages 306-338, July.
    5. Kfir Eliaz & Ran Spiegler, 2006. "Contracting with Diversely Naive Agents," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 73(3), pages 689-714.
    6. Marco Bertini & Luc Wathieu, 2008. "Research Note—Attention Arousal Through Price Partitioning," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 27(2), pages 236-246, 03-04.
    7. Guillermo Gallego & Özge Şahin, 2010. "Revenue Management with Partially Refundable Fares," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 58(4-part-1), pages 817-833, August.
    8. Ramandeep S. Randhawa & Sunil Kumar, 2008. "Usage Restriction and Subscription Services: Operational Benefits with Rational Users," Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, INFORMS, vol. 10(3), pages 429-447, December.
    9. Soman, Dilip, 2001. "Effects of Payment Mechanism on Spending Behavior: The Role of Rehearsal and Immediacy of Payments," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 27(4), pages 460-474, March.
    10. Stefano DellaVigna & Ulrike Malmendier, 2004. "Contract Design and Self-Control: Theory and Evidence," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 119(2), pages 353-402.
    11. Zeelenberg, Marcel & Beattie, Jane, 1997. "Consequences of Regret Aversion 2: Additional Evidence for Effects of Feedback on Decision Making," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 72(1), pages 63-78, October.
    12. Shane Frederick, 2005. "Cognitive Reflection and Decision Making," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 19(4), pages 25-42, Fall.
    13. Cox, James C & Oaxaca, Ronald L, 1989. "Laboratory Experiments with a Finite-Horizon Job-Search Model," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 2(3), pages 301-329, September.
    14. Michael D. Grubb, 2009. "Selling to Overconfident Consumers," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 99(5), pages 1770-1807, December.
    15. Eugenio J. Miravete, 2002. "Estimating Demand for Local Telephone Service with Asymmetric Information and Optional Calling Plans," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 69(4), pages 943-971.
    16. Oster Sharon M. & Scott Morton Fiona M., 2005. "Behavioral Biases Meet the Market: The Case of Magazine Subscription Prices," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 5(1), pages 1-32, March.
    17. Schotter, Andrew & Braunstein, Yale M, 1981. "Economic Search: An Experimental Study," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 19(1), pages 1-25, January.
    18. Kenneth E. Train & Daniel L. McFadden & Moshe Ben-Akiva, 1987. "The Demand for Local Telephone Service: A Fully Discrete Model of Residential Calling Patterns and Service Choices," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 18(1), pages 109-123, Spring.
    19. Charles A. Holt & Susan K. Laury, 2002. "Risk Aversion and Incentive Effects," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 92(5), pages 1644-1655, December.
    20. Raghuram Iyengar & Kamel Jedidi & Skander Essegaier & Peter J. Danaher, 2011. "The Impact of Tariff Structure on Customer Retention, Usage, and Profitability of Access Services," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 30(5), pages 820-836, September.
    21. Gérard P. Cachon & Pnina Feldman, 2011. "Pricing Services Subject to Congestion: Charge Per-Use Fees or Sell Subscriptions?," Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, INFORMS, vol. 13(2), pages 244-260, June.
    22. Kridel, Donald J. & Lehman, Dale E. & Weisman, Dennis L., 1993. "Option value, telecommunications demand, and policy," Information Economics and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 5(2), pages 125-144, July.
    23. Zeelenberg, Marcel & Beattie, Jane & van der Pligt, Joop & de Vries, Nanne K., 1996. "Consequences of Regret Aversion: Effects of Expected Feedback on Risky Decision Making," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 65(2), pages 148-158, February.
    24. Train, Kenneth E & Ben-Akiva, Moshe & Atherton, Terry, 1989. "Consumption Patterns and Self-selecting Tariffs," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 71(1), pages 62-73, February.
    25. Anja Lambrecht & Katja Seim & Bernd Skiera, 2007. "Does Uncertainty Matter? Consumer Behavior Under Three-Part Tariffs," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 26(5), pages 698-710, 09-10.
    26. Stefano DellaVigna & Ulrike Malmendier, 2006. "Paying Not to Go to the Gym," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 96(3), pages 694-719, June.
    27. Manoj Thomas & Vicki Morwitz, 2005. "Penny Wise and Pound Foolish: The Left-Digit Effect in Price Cognition," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 32(1), pages 54-64, June.
    28. Jinhong Xie & Steven M. Shugan, 2001. "Electronic Tickets, Smart Cards, and Online Prepayments: When and How to Advance Sell," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 20(3), pages 219-243, June.
    29. Jason D. Papastavrou & Srikanth Rajagopalan & Anton J. Kleywegt, 1996. "The Dynamic and Stochastic Knapsack Problem with Deadlines," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 42(12), pages 1706-1718, December.
    30. Arkes, Hal R. & Blumer, Catherine, 1985. "The psychology of sunk cost," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 35(1), pages 124-140, February.
    31. Drazen Prelec & George Loewenstein, 1998. "The Red and the Black: Mental Accounting of Savings and Debt," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 17(1), pages 4-28.
    32. Eugenio J. Miravete, 2003. "Choosing the Wrong Calling Plan? Ignorance and Learning," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 93(1), pages 297-310, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Choi, Tsan-Ming & Guo, Shu & Liu, Na & Shi, Xiutian, 2020. "Optimal pricing in on-demand-service-platform-operations with hired agents and risk-sensitive customers in the blockchain era," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 284(3), pages 1031-1042.
    2. Katharina Dowling & Lucas Stich & Martin Spann, 2021. "An experimental analysis of overconfidence in tariff choice," Review of Managerial Science, Springer, vol. 15(8), pages 2275-2297, November.
    3. Arun Gopalakrishnan & Raghuram Iyengar & Robert J. Meyer, 2015. "Consumer Dynamic Usage Allocation and Learning Under Multipart Tariffs," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 34(1), pages 116-133, January.
    4. Ruxian Wang & Maqbool Dada & Ozge Sahin, 2019. "Pricing Ancillary Service Subscriptions," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 65(10), pages 4712-4732, October.
    5. Jin, Haofeng & Lu, Zhentong & Huang, Liqiang & Dou, Junsheng, 2021. "Not too much nor too little: Salience bias in mobile plan choices," Telecommunications Policy, Elsevier, vol. 45(4).
    6. Masahiro Watabe, 2016. "A characterization of implementability of decision rules via a menu of three-part tariffs," Eurasian Economic Review, Springer;Eurasia Business and Economics Society, vol. 6(3), pages 459-479, December.
    7. Robert J. Batt & Jordan D. Tong, 2020. "Mean Service Metrics: Biased Quality Judgment and the Customer–Server Quality Gap," Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, INFORMS, vol. 22(5), pages 975-995, September.
    8. Mark Bender & Esther Gal‐Or & Tansev Geylani, 2022. "The emergence of streaming and its impact on pricing and product strategies of content providers," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 43(6), pages 2148-2171, September.
    9. Hurkens, Sjaak & López, Ángel L., 2021. "Mobile termination rates and retail regimes in Europe and the US: A unified theory of CPP and RPP," Information Economics and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 56(C).
    10. Dowling, Katharina & Manchanda, Puneet & Spann, Martin, 2021. "The existence and persistence of the pay-per-use bias in car sharing services," International Journal of Research in Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 38(2), pages 329-342.
    11. Chen, Claire Y.T. & Sun, Edward W. & Miao, Wanyu & Lin, Yi-Bing, 2024. "Reconciling business analytics with graphically initialized subspace clustering for optimal nonlinear pricing," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 312(3), pages 1086-1107.
    12. Seunghee Han & Jooyong Jun & Eunjung Yeo, 2021. "In Pursuit of Sustainable Mobile Policy: A Study of Consumer Tariff Preferences under Uncertainty," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(2), pages 1-20, January.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Fabian Herweg & Konrad Mierendorff, 2013. "Uncertain Demand, Consumer Loss Aversion, And Flat-Rate Tariffs," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 11(2), pages 399-432, April.
    2. Michael D. Grubb, 2009. "Selling to Overconfident Consumers," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 99(5), pages 1770-1807, December.
    3. Michael Grubb, 2015. "Behavioral Consumers in Industrial Organization: An Overview," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer;The Industrial Organization Society, vol. 47(3), pages 247-258, November.
    4. Shy, Oz, 2008. "Measuring the cost of making payment decisions," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 37(6), pages 2411-2416, December.
    5. Anja Lambrecht & Katja Seim & Naufel Vilcassim & Amar Cheema & Yuxin Chen & Gregory Crawford & Kartik Hosanagar & Raghuram Iyengar & Oded Koenigsberg & Robin Lee & Eugenio Miravete & Ozge Sahin, 2012. "Price discrimination in service industries," Marketing Letters, Springer, vol. 23(2), pages 423-438, June.
    6. Natalia Shestakova, 2010. "Overcoming Consumer Biases in the Choice of Pricing Schemes: A Lab Experiment," CERGE-EI Working Papers wp418, The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague.
    7. Laureti, Carolina & Szafarz, Ariane, 2023. "Banking regulation and costless commitment contracts for time-inconsistent agents," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 129(C).
    8. Krämer, Jan & Wiewiorra, Lukas, 2012. "Beyond the flat rate bias: The flexibility effect in tariff choice," Telecommunications Policy, Elsevier, vol. 36(1), pages 29-39.
    9. H. Schmale & T. Ehrmann & A. Dilger, 2013. "Buying without using -- biases of German BahnCard buyers," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 45(7), pages 933-941, March.
    10. Yacheng Sun & Shibo Li & Baohong Sun, 2015. "An Empirical Analysis of Consumer Purchase Decisions Under Bucket-Based Price Discrimination," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 34(5), pages 646-668, September.
    11. Wenner, Lukas M., 2018. "Do sellers exploit biased beliefs of buyers? An experiment," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 110(C), pages 194-215.
    12. Weixiang Huang & Yanzhi Li & Youhua Chen, 2021. "Overage Disutility, User Trading, and Tariff Design," Production and Operations Management, Production and Operations Management Society, vol. 30(10), pages 3758-3783, October.
    13. Stefano DellaVigna & Ulrike Malmendier, 2006. "Paying Not to Go to the Gym," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 96(3), pages 694-719, June.
    14. Jin, Haofeng & Lu, Zhentong & Huang, Liqiang & Dou, Junsheng, 2021. "Not too much nor too little: Salience bias in mobile plan choices," Telecommunications Policy, Elsevier, vol. 45(4).
    15. Michael D. Grubb, 2015. "Behavioral Consumers in Industrial Organization," Boston College Working Papers in Economics 879, Boston College Department of Economics.
    16. Stefano DellaVigna, 2009. "Psychology and Economics: Evidence from the Field," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 47(2), pages 315-372, June.
    17. Jong-Hee Hahn & Jinwoo Kim & Sang-Hyun Kim & Jihong Lee, 2018. "Price discrimination with loss averse consumers," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 65(3), pages 681-728, May.
    18. Grubb, Michael D., 2012. "Dynamic nonlinear pricing: Biased expectations, inattention, and bill shock," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 30(3), pages 287-290.
    19. Ariel Casarin, 2014. "Regulated price reforms and unregulated substitutes: the case of residential piped gas in Argentina," Journal of Regulatory Economics, Springer, vol. 45(1), pages 34-56, February.
    20. Arun Gopalakrishnan & Raghuram Iyengar & Robert J. Meyer, 2015. "Consumer Dynamic Usage Allocation and Learning Under Multipart Tariffs," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 34(1), pages 116-133, January.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    access services; pricing contracts; decision biases; experiment;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior
    • D03 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Behavioral Microeconomics: Underlying Principles
    • D12 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis
    • L11 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Production, Pricing, and Market Structure; Size Distribution of Firms

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_3698. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Klaus Wohlrabe (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cesifde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.