Managerial Economics & Organizational Architecture 6th Edition by James Brickley , Clifford Smith ,Jerold Zimmerman

Exercise 5

ANALYZING MANAGERIAL DECISIONS: Cell Phone Pricing
You are a pricing manager for a cell phone company. You have two types of customers with different demand curves for your service. The demand curves for an individual customer from each group for hours of talk time per month are
Type A customer: P = 10 - 2 Q
Type B customer: P = 10 - 2 Q
Your marginal cost for providing hours of phone service is zero (all your costs are fixed). There are 1,000 customers of each type.
You know the demand curves for the two types of customers. However, it is impossible for you to identify when a person purchases a plan whether the customer is from one group or the other.
Design a menu plan that extracts all of the consumer surplus from the Type A customers and as much as possible from the Type B customers given that they have the option to purchase your first plan (it might help to graph the problem). Each of the plans on the menu must offer a maximum number of hours of talk time per month for a fixed monthly fee. ( Hint: You can extract all the consumer surplus from the Type A customers using a two-part tariff. Such a plan can be expressed in terms of offering a fixed number of minutes at a fixed price.)