y and maximise on savings. Paradoxically, a similar concept in service provision carries a ‘loyalty penalty’ for British consumers, who are losing out on £4bn a year (CMA, 2018). Firms exploit uninformed customers, by discriminating between them. Contrastingly, naïve consumers become complacent and blindly trust their current suppliers, whilst those that may be aware of such practises are deterred away by high search or switching costs.
In an environment where consumers are loyal, hence have an inelastic demand, or are simply uninformed, due to the presence of search costs, firms can choose to employ second and third-degree price discrimination. For example, British Gas offers a range of tariffs dependent on your needs, location etc. for electricity usage.
I illustrate how firms manipulate prices by adopting the Stahl-Varian model. We can change the assumptions from the original model so that the informed customers, I, are new customers, and the uninformed customers, M, are old customers. Thus, the uninformed customers will have a search cost, c, if they look for cheaper service providers. The other assumptions remain the same; all consumers have the same reservation price, r, and there are n symmetric firms in the market.
The number of old (uninformed) customers per firm, U, is exogenously given by:
Firms choose prices between p*, which equals to the marginal cost, and r. Informed customers have knowledge of prices provided by firms, thus, they will only buy from the cheapest firm.
The firm will sell to I with probability:
The firm will sell to M with probability:
Therefore, the firm’s expected profits are given by:
In a competitive market, firms behave in a way to maximise profits. Gamble et al., (2013), suggest firms are cognizant of customer costs; they recognise when customers are likely to switch. In this case, they will lower their price so that the price difference between theirs and rival prices is less than the search and switching costs, thereby stopping customers from switching.
The firm sets prices to maximises profits:
The derivative helps us find the profit maximisation pr
