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Price-matching guarantees are widely used in consumer and industrial markets. Previous studies argue that they are a marketing tactic that facilitates implicit price collusion. This is because once a store adopts this marketing tactic, its rivals can no longer steal its customers by undercutting its price, and hence they have little incentive to initiate price cuts. While a store with price-matching guarantees has no fear of losing customers to rivals' price cuts, it has every incentive to raise its own price to charge a higher price to its loyal consumers. A growing body of legal literature uses this argument today to justify calls for antitrust actions against stores employing this marketing tactic.

However, this theoretical conclusion baffles practitioners and industry experts. In practice, sellers typically embrace this marketing tactic in response to heavier competition and a growing bargain consciousness among shoppers. The …