Intertemporal self-selection with multiple buyers

Abstract

We consider a monopolist selling durable goods to consumers with unit demands but different preferences for quality. The seller can offer items of different quality at the same time to induce buyers to self-select, as in Mussa-Rosen (1978), but is not artificially constrained to offer only one such menu. Instead the seller can offer without precommitment a sequence of menus over time. In the two-buyer case where the seller has complete information about each buyer's marginal valuation for quality, the seller's profits exceed what can be obtained from a single menu and sometimes approximate the profits of a perfectly discriminating monopolist. In companion papers (Bagnoli et al., 1990, 1992), we show that these conclusions continue to hold (1) in the infinite-horizon case with any finite number of buyers and (2) in two-period examples where the seller has incomplete information about buyer preferences.