The Limits of Price Discrimination
49 Pages Posted: 27 Sep 2014
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The Limits of Price Discrimination
The Limits of Price Discrimination
The Limits of Price Discrimination
The Limits of Price Discrimination
Date Written: September 25, 2014
Abstract
We analyze the welfare consequences of a monopolist having additional information about consumers' tastes, beyond the prior distribution; the additional information can be used to charge different prices to different segments of the market, i.e., carry out "third degree price discrimination." We show that the segmentation and pricing induced by the additional information can achieve every combination of consumer and producer surplus such that: (i) consumer surplus is non-negative, (ii) producer surplus is at least as high as profits under the uniform monopoly price, and (iii) total surplus does not exceed the surplus generated by efficient trade.
Keywords: First degree price discrimination, Second degree price discrimination, Third degree price discrimination, Private information, Privacy, Bayes correlated equilibrium, Concavification
JEL Classification: C72, D82, D83
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation