Dynamic pricing is widely adopted in many industries, such as travel and insurance. These industries are also gaining extensive capabilities in identifying and segmenting customers, partly fueled by the increasing availability of data. It is natural to ask whether firms should take advantage of such developments by charging different prices to different customer segments. If so, under what conditions? We seek answers to these highly managerially relevant questions.

We consider a market with two customer segments served by a monopolist. The monopolist can choose among a set of pricing strategies to exploit consumers’ inter-temporal preferences and/or inter-segment variations. At one end of the spectrum, the firm can charge a constant price to all customers, which is called static pricing. At the other end of the spectrum, the firm can charge different prices to different customer segments and vary these prices over time, which is referred to as dynamic targeted pricing. We systematically compare these alternative pricing strategies. We show that dynamic pricing without targeting can be more effective than static targeted pricing when customers are not very forward looking, which corroborates the findings in the empirical literature. Interestingly, we find that the monopolist can be worse off when she adopts targeting in addition to dynamic pricing. We conduct laboratory experiments to test several key model predictions. The studies show that individuals behave in a manner consistent with the predictions of our model.

动态定价在许多行业中被广泛采用，例如旅游和保险。这些行业还在识别和细分客户方面获得了广泛的能力，部分原因是数据的可用性不断提高。很自然地会问，公司是否应该通过向不同的客户群收取不同的价格来利用这种发展。如果是这样，在什么条件下？我们寻求这些与管理高度相关的问题的答案。

我们考虑一个由垄断者服务的两个客户群的市场。垄断者可以在一组定价策略中进行选择，以利用消费者的跨期偏好和/或跨部门差异。一方面，公司可以向所有客户收取固定价格，这称为静态定价。另一方面，公司可以向不同的客户群收取不同的价格，并随着时间的推移改变这些价格，这被称为动态目标定价。我们系统地比较了这些替代定价策略。我们表明，当客户的前瞻性不是很强时，没有目标的动态定价比静态目标定价更有效，这证实了实证文献中的发现。有趣的是，我们发现，除了动态定价之外，垄断者还采用目标定位时，情况可能会更糟。我们进行实验室实验来测试几个关键模型预测。研究表明，个人的行为方式与我们模型的预测一致。