Gender-Based Pricing in Consumer Packaged Goods: A Pink Tax?

The authors thank Sara Drango, Malika Korganbekova, Vitalii Tubdenov, and Jason Zhao for excellent research assistance. Thanks also for the helpful feedback from Eric Anderson, Jean-Pierre Dubé, Günter Hitsch, Ayelet Israeli, Anja Lambrecht, Amalia Miller, Aviv Nevo, and Yesim Orhun, as well as seminar participants at Georgia Tech, Northwestern–Kellogg, Temple, Vrije Universitat, Yale, University of Toronto, the Quantitative Marketing and Economics Rossi Seminar hosted by the University of Rochester, and the Virtual Quant Marketing Seminar, and participants at the 14th FTC Microeconomics, 2023 Winter American Marketing Association, and 2023 Marketing Science Diversity Equity and Inclusion conferences. Researchers’ own analyses were calculated (or derived) based in part on (i) retail measurement/consumer data from Nielsen Consumer LLC (“NielsenIQ”); (ii) media data from The Nielsen Company (U.S.), LLC (“Nielsen”); (iii) marketing databases provided through the respective NielsenIQ and the Nielsen Datasets; (iv) data from Syndigo LLC; (v) data from Label Insight, Inc.; and (vi) data from The Numerator Company (U.S.), LLC, and marketing databases provided through the Numerator Datasets at the Kilts Center for Marketing Data Center at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The conclusions drawn from the Nielsen, Syndigo, Label Insight, and Numerator data are those of the researchers and do not reflect the views of NielsenIQ, Nielsen, Syndigo, Label Insight, or Numerator. Neither NielsenIQ, Nielsen, Syndigo, Label Insight, nor Numerator is responsible for, had any role in, or was involved in analyzing and preparing the results reported herein. Natasha Vajravelu coauthored this paper before joining Cornerstone Research. The views expressed herein are solely those of the authors who are responsible for the content and do not necessarily represent the views of Cornerstone Research. This paper was previously circulated under the name Natasha Bhatia. Author Natasha Vajravelu discloses that they are an employee of an economic litigation consulting firm, but they are not aware of, nor do they anticipate any financial conflicts of interest related to this research.