Effects of consumers' context‐dependent preferences on product bundling

Abstract

Bundling can change consumers' choice set and affect their purchase decision. It is well documented that consumers' preferences depend on the bundling context. In this paper, we investigate the effects of consumers' context‐dependent preferences (CDPs) on the firm's optimal bundling strategy in various competitive situations. We consider a market where a monopolist firm in product category A also sells a product in product category B. We analyze three scenarios in category B: (1) an independent firm selling a higher quality product, (2) two independent firms selling the higher quality product, and (3) the monopolist in category A is also a monopolist in category B. We find that CDPs can indeed change the firm's optimal bundling strategy. When the firm has a competitive disadvantage in category B, CDPs encourage the firm to offer the bundle (by either pure bundling or mixed bundling). Furthermore, if category B market is so competitive that the firm possesses negligible market power, mixed bundling can be strictly more effective at increasing the firm's profit than pure bundling because mixed bundling can better take advantage of CDPs. In contrast, if the firm has monopoly power in both categories, CDPs discourage the introduction of the bundle, and pure‐component selling is optimal.