Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Fast Forward or Rewind?

According to The Wall Street Journal, Netflix has split their services into two subscription types and increased the combined price by products by 60%. They expected to only lose 4% or one million of their customers.

However, due to the price increase, Netflix customers responded elastically by canceling their subscriptions at a faster pace than the company had forecasted. In other words, the elasticity of DVDs and on-demand movies was greater than they had expected. In fact, in the last three months, their stock has fallen 63%, mainly due to this pricing misstep.  

Obviously, they did not take the time to read chapter 6 of Krugman’s textbook.

Although they have recombined their services into one subscription, they have kept the price increase. If I were you, I would not buy this stock as Netflix clearly does not understand how its customers will respond to changes in its services.

So, I now ask you, should Netflix fast forward or rewind? 

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