"The Best Price You'll Ever Get": The 2005 Employee Discount Pricing Promotions in the U.S. Automobile Industry

During the summer of 2005, the Big Three U.S. automobile manufacturers offered a customer promotion that allowed customers to buy new cars at the discounted price formerly offered only to employees. The initial months of the promotion were record sales months for each of the Big Three firms, suggesting that customers thought that the prices offered during the promotions were particularly attractive. In fact, such large rebates had been available before the employee discount promotion that many customers paid higher prices following the introduction of the promotions than they would have in the weeks just before. We hypothesize that the complex nature of auto prices, the fact that prices are negotiated rather than posted, and the fact that buyers do not participate frequently in the market leads customers to rely on “price cues” in evaluating how good current prices are. We argue that the employee discount pricing promotions were price cues, and that customers responded to the promotions as a signal that prices were discounted. ∗ We are grateful for helpful comments from seminar participants at Washington University, UC Berkeley, Harvard Business School, and Dartmouth, and from participants in the NBER IO Program Meeting and the Global Marketing Thought Leaders conference in New Zealand. We are particularly grateful to Steve Berry and Jennifer Aaker for their detailed reviews of the paper, to Jorge Silva-Risso, and to an anonymous automobile manufacturer for their numerous contributions to the project. + Contact: [email protected]. Busse gratefully acknowledges the support of NSF grants SES0550508 and SES-0550911. ++ Contact: [email protected]. +++ Contact: [email protected]. Zettelmeyer gratefully acknowledges the support of NSF grants SES-0550508 and SES-0550911. “The Best Price You’ll Ever Get”: The 2005 Employee Discount Pricing Promotions in the U.S. Automobile Industry