Pricing for sales and per-use rental services with vertical differentiation

An increasing number of firms are simultaneously offering consumers products for sale and for per-use rental services. Typically, the products offered in per-use rental services are different from those offered for sale. For example, automobiles offered in Daimler's Car2Go program are “Smart” cars, which have a smaller size than the typical automobiles sold to consumers. Such a difference, which is objectively measurable and captured by quality, is called a vertical differentiation. This study investigates the optimal pricing problem for per-use rental services and sales, and reveals how per-use rental services interplay with sales when vertical differentiation exists. The optimal solution is unique and determined by a model that uses a marginal renter and a marginal buyer as decision variables rather than the prices of per-use rental services and sales. The vertical differentiation significantly influences a firm's potential profitability. When the vertical differentiation falls into a certain interval, the potential profitability from per-use rental services is higher than that from sales, which explains why the per-use rental business model is increasing in popularity. Finally, the results show that offering products with a relatively high (low) quality in per-use rental services (sales) is highly profitable for product categories with a strong pooling effect or when there are high firm-side benefits from ownership. This finding enriches the existing literature by providing novel perspectives on ownership and the pooling effect, and these insights are illustrated through a numerical example.