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Nos visita Wesley Hartmann, Profesor de Marketing, Stanford Graduate School of Business

Hoy lunes 11 de septiembre está de visita el Profesor Hartmann  quien dictará la charla “Information versus Automation and Implications for Dynamic Pricing” (coautor Bryan Bollinger). La charla es parte del ciclo de Seminarios “Management Science” y se llevará a cabo en la sala 401, 4º piso, Beauchef 851, a las 13:30 horas.

Abstract

The lack of price variation in resource markets prevents consumers from realizing the short-run costs that arise during temporary scarcity.  This shifts consumers toward longer run conservation alternatives less aligned with short-run needs.  Short-run adaptation of behavior via the price mechanism is however becoming more feasible as information, communication and automation technologies may address the inability of consumers to respond to frequent price changes. We analyze data from a field experiment that randomly assigns consumers to a fixed vs. dynamic price schedule and technology interventions with a mix of these solutions. Treatment effects show statistically and economically significant demand reductions during peak and critical times for all technologies with dynamic pricing, although automation outperforms information and communication. The treatment effects, however, reflect long-run elasticities because, like other electricity experiments, randomization is at the household level across long-run price distributions as opposed to the within-household variation in short-run prices which is necessary for recovering short-run price elasticities. We document how household random assignment confounds these elasticities and then develop an approach to use the demand from the randomly assigned control group as an input to a non-parametric control function in the demand equation for households on dynamic pricing plans. We find that only the automation technologies generate meaningful short-run demand elasticties. Pure information or communication interventions yield nearly perfectly inelastic demand curves that have simply been shifted horizontally relative to the control group demand curve. Such long-run shifts could be obtained by non-price methods or permanent price increases, suggesting that use of dynamic pricing in these and related markets may require automation technology to enable the moderate demand elasticities necessary to realize gains from dynamic pricing.