Assist. Prof. Anna Sanktjohanser, Ph.D.

Consumer Choices

While visiting CES, Anna Sanktjohanser will pursue research on competition, price discrimination and consumer search. The project, joint with Johannes Hörner and James Dana, shows that discounts for frequent buyers are an outcome of price discrimination by firms in imperfectly competitive markets with costly consumer search. They consider models of both search and experience goods, when consumers differ only in their purchase frequency. Consumers’ valuations are drawn from the same distribution and consumers have identical costs of search. However, because frequent buyers have greater incentives to search, in equilibrium they have better outside options, search more often, and have higher ex post expected valuations. Competing firms offer lower prices to frequent buyers, and when consumers’ purchase frequency is private information, they do so using loyalty programs or frequent buyer discounts. These consumers receive lower prices even though in equilibrium they have greater gains from trade (higher valuations).

Ms. Sanktjohanser is a microeconomic theorist, with a primary interest in dynamic games, and is currently working on reputational bargaining and repeated games. Her works in progress include: “Dynamic Screening,” “Why Weight isn’t Volume, Bargaining with Multiple Partners,” and “Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Equilibrium Uniqueness in a Repeated Partnership Game.” During her stay in Munich, she will deliver three CES Lectures entitled “Bargaining with Incomplete Information.”

Anna Sanktjohanser is Assistant Professor at the Toulouse School of Economics. She was previously Assistant Professor of Economics at Yale University and a postdoctoral fellow at the Toulouse School of Economics. She is a CESifo Research Network Affiliate. Ms. Sanktjohanser received a PhD in Economics from the University of Oxford and holds an MPhil in Economics, and a BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, both also from Oxford.