Product Upgrades and Posted Prices

We consider the dynamic pricing problem of a durable good monopolist with full commitment power, when a new version of the good is expected at some point in the future. The new version of the good is superior to the existing one, bringing a higher ow utility. If the arrival is a stationary stochastic process, then the corresponding optimal price path is shown to be constant for both versions of the good, hence there is no delay on purchases and time is not used to discriminate over buyers, which is in line with the literature. However, if the arrival of the new version occurs at a commonly known deterministic date, then the optimal price path may be decreasing over time, resulting in delayed purchases. For both stochastic and deterministic arrival processes, posted prices is not the optimal mechanism, which on the other hand, involves into bundling of both new and old versions of the good and selling them only together.