Costly customer relations and pricing

In this paper we show that when a monopolist incurs certain costs for servicing or maintaining its customer-base, price markups may decrease with high demand — i.e. markups are countercylical. Indeed, for a given market share when demand booms each customer on average will purchase more output and the costs of servicing clients are spread across a larger volume of output sold. This increasing-return effect raises the incentive for the monopolists to expand its market-share by reducing markups. We also find evidence on UK data that industries with higher customer-care costs tend to have a higher degree of coutercyclical markups as compared with industries with lower such costs. JEL classifications: D4, E32, C61