Can Switching Costs Reduce Prices

Abstract

The existence of switching costs for consumers may aect prices.While rms have an incentive to increase prices and exploit its currentconsumers, they also might reduce prices to increase the number ofconsumers next period. This paper presents a model of consumer andpricing behavior with switching costs to investigate how prices vary withdierent switching costs levels. I also present a method to estimatemodel's parameters. Results show that prices do not monotonicallyincrease with switching costs. Market shares and prots increase forsmall switching cost values and decrease for larger ones.