Costly customer relations and pricing

C-Tier
Journal: Oxford Economic Papers
Year: 2007
Volume: 59
Issue: 4
Pages: 641-661

Authors (2)

Score contribution per author:

0.505 = (α=2.02 / 2 authors) × 0.5x C-tier

α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count

Abstract

In this paper we show that when a monopolist incurs certain costs for servicing or maintaining its customer-base, price markups may decrease with high demand — i.e. markups are countercylical. Indeed, for a given market share when demand booms each customer on average will purchase more output and the costs of servicing clients are spread across a larger volume of output sold. This increasing-return effect raises the incentive for the monopolists to expand its market-share by reducing markups. We also find evidence on UK data that industries with higher customer-care costs tend to have a higher degree of coutercyclical markups as compared with industries with lower such costs. Copyright 2007 , Oxford University Press.

Technical Details

RePEc Handle
repec:oup:oxecpp:v:59:y:2007:i:4:p:641-661
Journal Field
General
Author Count
2
Added to Database
2026-01-25