Rationing Capacity in Advance Selling to Signal Quality

We consider a seller who can sell her product over two periods, advance and spot. The seller has private information about the product quality, which is unknown to customers in advance and publicly revealed in spot. The question we consider is whether the seller has an incentive to signal quality in advance and, if so, how she can convey a credible signal of product quality. We characterize the seller's signaling strategy and find that rationing of capacity in the advance period is an effective tool of signaling product quality. We find that the high-quality seller can distinguish herself by allocating less capacity than the low-quality seller in the advance period. We show that this signaling mechanism exists whenever advance selling would be optimal for both the high-quality and low-quality sellers if quality information was symmetric. We compare capacity rationing with other signaling tools, such as pricing and advertising, and show that capacity rationing is the preferred one. Despite its capability of conveying quality information more efficiently than other tools, capacity rationing may still be very costly for the seller. When compared to the case when rationing was not allowed, the seller's ability to ration (rationing flexibility) sometimes makes the seller worse off, independently of her quality.