That $4 bucket of popcorn you get in the movie theater costs less than $0.10 to produce. What explains the 4,000 percent markup? Economists have struggled with this question for years, and now we have an answer. Moviegoers vary in their willingness to pay for seeing a movie, and a movie theater has an incentive to identify the high demanders and charge them more, while keeping the price low for the low demanders. It turns out that a reliable predictor of the willingness to pay for a movie is the consumption of movie popcorn: The people who buy a lot of popcorn are the consumers who are willing to pay the most for a movie experience. So a convenient way for the theater to charge more to the consumers who are willing to pay more is to jack up the price of popcorn. As a result, the low demanders simply pay the admission price, while the high demanders pay the admission price plus the jacked-up price of a bucket of popcorn.

We can illustrate with a simple example. Suppose a low demander is willing to pay $11 for a movie, while a high demander is willing to pay $15 for a movie and popcorn. If the theater charges $10 for admission and $4 for popcorn, each consumer will get a consumer surplus of $1 (equal to $11 - $10 for the low demander and $15 - $14 for the high demander), so both consumers will see the movie. If instead the theater charged $12 for admission and $0.10 for popcorn, the high demander will see the movie, but the low demander won’t. The theater’s pricing strategy gets the low demander into the theater at a price of $10, and because the marginal cost of an additional consumer is close to zero, the theater’s profit increases.

Question.

When do firms have an opportunity to charge different prices to different consumers?

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Popcor