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Advances in manufacturing and information technologies have made it possible for firms to satisfy consumers’ increasing demand for unique products. Although, the mass customization of products is prevalent in almost all industries today, firms’ optimal mass customization strategy is still not that clear. The initial attempt to mass customization of a number of firms failed, because it proved to be unprofitable, while others have successfully established mass customization as a product strategy. The optimal degree of mass customization solves two decision problems: first, firms’ trade-off between the coverage of consumers’ preferences to charge a premium price and cost-efficient production; second, consumers’ trade-off between tailoring a product to their needs and interaction costs. In an attempt to facilitate managerial decision making, this thesis studies a firm’s mass customization decision in a game-theoretical model that combines the decision problems faced by each player in the interaction. Based on this model of company-customer interaction, novel insights into the optimal mass customization strategy of firms depending on their market and competitive environment are gained.
In many situations, firms have an incentive to charge different prices to different consumers. A price discrimination strategy aims at exploiting differences in consumers' willingness to pay in order to increase the firm's profit. At the same time, consumers often evaluate a purchase transaction with respect to the perceived (un)fairness regarding the terms of the transaction, prices or qualities provided. If consumers are inequity averse to the extent that they care about whether other customers pay a lower relative price per quality, a quality based price discrimination may turn out less profitable than if consumers act selfishly.
The dissertation project analyzes the impact of consumer social preferences on the implementation of different pricing strategies in monopolistic and duopolistic markets. It accounts for asymmetrically distributed information about product quality and emphasizes the optimal signaling strategies in a monopoly. Additionally, quality-based price discrimination is identified as the optimal strategy to eliminate potential competition under perfect information. In the context of third-degree price discrimination, the effect of inequity aversion on quality choices is analyzed.