We consider the dynamic pricing problem of a monopolist firm in a market with repeated interactions, where demand is sensitive to the firm's pricing history. Consumers have memory and are prone to human decision making biases and cognitive limitations. As the firm manipulates prices, consumers form a reference price that adjusts as an anchoring standard based on price perceptions. Purchase decisions are made by assessing prices as discounts or surcharges relative to the reference price, in the spirit of prospect theory. We prove that optimal pricing policies induce a perception of monotonic prices, whereby consumers always perceive a discount, respectively surcharge, relative to their expectations. The effect is that of a skimming or penetration strategy. The firm's optimal pricing path is monotonic on the long run, but not necessarily at the introductory stage. If consumers are loss averse, we show that optimal prices converge to a constant steady state price, characterized by a simple implicit equation; otherwise the optimal policy cycles. The range of steady states is wider the more loss averse consumers are. Steady state prices decrease with the strength of the reference effect, and with customers' memory, all else equal. Offering lower prices to frequent customers may be suboptimal, however, if these are less sensitive to price changes than occasional buyers. If managers ignore such long term implications of their pricing strategy, the model indicates that they will systematically price too low and lose revenue. Our results hold under very general reference dependent demand models.

Supply chain contracting literature has traditionally focused on aligning incentives for economically rational players. Recent work has hypothesized that social preferences, as distinct from economic incentives, may influence behavior in supply chain transactions. Social preferences refer to intrinsic concerns for the other party's welfare, reciprocating a history of a positive relationship, and intrinsic desires for a higher relative payoff compared with the other party's when status is salient. This article provides experimental evidence that social preferences systematically affect economic decision making in supply chain transactions. Specifically, supply chain parties deviate from the predictions provided by self-interested profit-maximization models, such that relationship preference promotes cooperation, individual performance, and high system efficiency, sustainable over time; whereas status preference induces tough actions and reduces both system efficiency and individual performance.social preference, relationship, status, supply chain performance, experimental economics

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Members of a supply chain often make profit comparisons. A retailer exhibits peer-induced fairness concerns when his own profit is

Members of a supply chain often make profit comparisons. A retailer exhibits peer-induced fairness concerns when his own profit is behind that of a peer retailer interacting with the same supplier. In addition, a retailer exhibits distributional fairness when his supplier's share of total profit is larger than his own. While existing research focuses exclusively on distributional fairness concerns, this study investigates how both types of fairness might interact and influence economic outcomes in a supply chain. We consider a one-supplier and two-retailer supply chain setting, and we show that (i) in the presence of distributional fairness alone, the wholesale price offer is lower than the standard wholesale price offer; (ii) in the presence of both types of fairness, the second wholesale price is higher than the first wholesale price; and (iii) in the presence of both types of fairness, the second retailer makes a lower profit and has a lower share of the total supply chain profit than the first retailer. We run controlled experiments with subjects motivated by substantial monetary incentives and show that subject behaviors are consistent with the model predictions. Structural estimation on the data suggests that peer-induced fairness is more salient than distributional fairness.