Intertemporal bundling

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Lu, Jingfeng; Zhao, Wenbo
• 署名单位: National University of Singapore; University of Jinan
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC THEORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0531
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2025.106127
• 发表日期: 2026
• 关键词: Mechanism design; monopoly; revenue

摘要

This paper studies when and how intertemporal bundling arises in optimal dynamic selling mechanisms in a two-period setting, where two objects (A and B) are sequentially available for sale. When the buyer's values of the two objects (vA and vB respectively) are independent, in contrast to conventional insight from simultaneous sales, we find in our setting that there is no loss in relying on separate sales for optimal design. This result extends under widely adopted regularity conditions when the values are positively correlated in the sense that vB is stochastically increasing in vA. However, if vB is stochastically decreasing in vA, separate sales are no longer optimal, and the optimal integrated design features intertemporal bundling. When it is always efficient to provide each good, the optimal selling mechanism is implemented by offering a menu of intertemporal bundles with different prices, where each bundle consists of the second object together with a probabilistic proportion of the first object. In particular, if the buyer's virtual value of the first good is always non-negative, pure bundling becomes optimal.