Consumer Choice Modeling in Product Line Pricing: Reservation Prices and Discrete Choice Theory

In the literature on product line pricing, consumer choice is often modeled using the max-surplus choice rule. In terms of this concept, consumer preferences are represented by so-called reservation prices and the deterministic decision rule is to choose the product that provides the highest positive surplus. However, the distribution of the reservation prices often seems somewhat arbitrary. In this paper, we demonstrate how reservation prices can be obtained using discrete choice analysis and that these two concepts are not as different as often perceived in the literature. A small example illustrates this approach, using data from a discrete choice model taken from the literature.