Oligopoly under incomplete information: On the welfare effects of price discrimination

We study competition by firms that simultaneously post (potentially nonlinear) tariffs to consumers who are privately informed about their tastes. Market power stems from informational frictions, in that consumers are heterogeneously informed about firms’ offers. In the absence of regulation, all firms offer quantity discounts. As a result, relative to Bertrand pricing, imperfect competition benefits disproportionately more consumers whose willingness to pay is high, rather than low. Regulation imposing linear pricing hurts the former but benefits the latter consumers. While consumer surplus increases, firms’ profits decrease, enough to drive down utilitarian welfare. By contrast, improvements in market transparency increase utilitarian welfare, and achieve similar gains on consumer surplus as imposing linear pricing, although with limited distributive impact. On normative grounds, our analysis suggests that banning price discrimination is warranted only if its distributive benefits have a weight on the societal objective.     

Competitive customer poaching with asymmetric firms

Conditioning the pricing policies on purchase history is proven to generate a cutthroat price competition enhancing consumer surplus. This result typically relies on a framework where competitors are assumed to be symmetric. This paper demonstrates that under significant asymmetries of competing firms, the strong firm trades off current market share for future market share and the weak firm does the opposite. This inter-temporal market sharing agreement generates unidirectional poaching and entails new and distinctive welfare implications. In particular, if consumers are sufficiently myopic, price discrimination softens price competition in relation to uniform pricing, overturning the conclusion of previous studies.     

Personalized pricing and advertising: Who are the winners?

This paper investigates who wins and who loses when firms depart from a mass advertising/uniform pricing strategy (benchmark model) to a targeted advertising/price discrimination one. Considering a duopoly market in which firms simultaneously compete in prices and advertising decisions, we examine the competitive and welfare effects of personalized pricing with targeted advertising by comparing equilibrium outcomes under customized advertising/ pricing decisions to the results arising under mass advertising and uniform pricing. We show that, when both firms compete in both market segments, all segment consumers are expected to pay higher average prices under the personalized advertising/pricing strategy. We also show that, in the context of our simultaneous game, targeted advertising with price discrimination might boost firms’ profits in comparison to the case of mass advertising and uniform prices. The overall welfare effects of the personalized strategy are ambiguous. However, even when the personalized strategy boosts overall welfare, consumers might all be worse-off. Thus the paper gives support to concerns that have been raised regarding the firms’ ability to adopt personalized strategies to boost profits at the expense of consumers.     

Input Price Discrimination and Allocation Efficiency

This research examines the effects of input price discrimination on allocation efficiency and social welfare. Instead of assuming constant marginal costs, we allow downstream firms to produce under increasing marginal costs. When downstream firms operate in separate markets, even though total output remains unchanged, consumer surplus and social welfare could be greater under discriminatory pricing than under uniform pricing. Moreover, the social desirability of input price discrimination can still hold true when downstream firms compete either in Cournot or Bertrand fashion.

     

THE DEADWEIGHT LOSS OF COUPON REMEDIES FOR PRICE OVERCHARGES*

Consumers injured by price overcharges often are awarded coupons that can be used for a limited period of time to purchase the good at a price below that which prevails after the overcharge has been eliminated. Coupon remedies cause a deadweight loss by inducing excessive consumption by consumers with relatively low demand during the remedy period. The magnitude of the loss can be comparable to that caused by the price overcharge. As demand variability goes to zero, the deadweight loss from coupon remedies goes to zero. Eliminating the expiration date for the use of coupons does not eliminate the loss.     

CUSTOMER POACHING AND ADVERTISING*

This paper is a first look at the dynamic effects of customer poaching in homogeneous product markets, where firms need to invest in advertising to generate awareness. When a firm is able to recognize customers with different purchasing histories, it may send them targeted advertisements with different prices. It is shown that only the firm which advertises the highest price in the first period will engage in price discrimination, a practice that clearly benefits the discriminating firm. This poaching gives rise to ‘the race for discrimination effect,’ through which price discrimination may act actually to soften price competition rather than intensify it. As a result, all firms may become better off, even when only one of them can engage in price discrimination. This paper offers a first attempt to evaluate the effects of price discrimination on the efficiency properties of advertising. In markets with low or no advertising costs, allowing firms to price discriminate leads them to provide too little advertising, which is not good for consumers and overall welfare. Only in markets with high advertising costs, might firms overadvertise. Regarding the welfare effects, price discrimination is generally bad for welfare and consumer surplus, though good for firms.     

Uniform Pricing as a Barrier to Entry

This paper considers an entry game in which an incumbent firm operates in a number of markets and a potential entrant can enter multiple or all of the markets. While price discrimination has usually been thought of as a barrier to entry, in our model it is not and instead, charging a uniform price across the markets can discourage entry. Partial entry occurs when the two firms' products are highly substitutable. In this case, uniform pricing raises the profits of both the incumbent and the entrant but reduces consumer and total welfare relative to price discrimination.     

PRICE DISCRIMINATION IN STACKELBERG COMPETITION*

We examine the effects of price discrimination in the Stackelberg competition model for the linear demand case. We show that the leader does not use any price discrimination at all. Rather, the follower does all price discrimination. The leader directs all of its first mover preemptive advantage to attract the highest value consumers who pay a uniformly high price. We observe that profits and total welfare are larger and consumer surplus is smaller than those of the standard Stackelberg competition model.     

Elasticity of demand and behaviour-based price discrimination

Behaviour-based price discrimination (BBPD) is typically analysed in a framework characterised by perfectly inelastic demand. This paper provides a first assessment of the role of demand elasticity on the profit, consumer and welfare effects of BBPD. We show that the demand expansion effect, that is obviously overlooked by the standard framework with unit demand, plays a relevant role. In comparison to uniform pricing, we show that firms are worse off under BBPD, however, as demand elasticity increases the negative impact of BBPD on profits gets smaller. Despite a possible slight increase in the average prices charged over the two periods in comparison to uniform pricing, we show that BBPD boosts consumer surplus and that this benefit is independent of elasticity. In contrast to the welfare results derived under the unit demand assumption, where BBPD is always bad for welfare, the paper shows that BBPD can be welfare enhancing if demand elasticity is sufficiently high.     

Differential Pricing in Intermediate Good Markets

This paper studies differential pricing by an upstream monopolist whose cost to supply the intermediate good differs across buyers in the downstream. It is shown that, different from demand‐based price discrimination, cost‐based differential pricing shifts production efficiently. If total output (and consumer welfare) is weakly increased under differential pricing as opposed to uniform pricing, as is true for weakly convex final market demand functions, social welfare is strictly improved. The analysis is extended to the case in which both the upstream monopolist's cost to serve the downstream firms and the downstream firms’ cost to produce the final good differ.     

How does income inequality affect market outcomes in vertically differentiated markets?

The distribution of consumer incomes is a key factor in determining the structure of a vertically differentiated industry when consumer's willingness to pay depends on her income. This paper computes the Shaked and Sutton (1982) model for a lognormal distribution of consumer incomes to investigate the effect of inequality on firms' entry, product quality, and pricing decisions. The main findings are that greater inequality in consumer incomes leads to the entry of more firms and results in more intense quality competition among the entrants. More intense quality competition raises the average quality of products in the market as firms compete for the shrinking share of higher-income consumers. With zero costs of quality improvements and an upper bound on the top quality or when costs of quality are fixed and rise sufficiently fast, greater heterogeneity of consumer incomes also reduces firms' incentives to differentiate their products. Competition between more similar products tends to reduce their prices. However, when income inequality is very high, the top quality producer chooses to serve only the rich segment of the market and charges a higher price. The conclusion is that income inequality has important implications for the degree of product differentiation, price level, industry concentration, and consumer welfare.     

Multi-dimensional price discrimination

We examine the profitability and welfare implications of price discrimination in a multi-dimensional model. First, when firms price discriminate on one and the same dimension, uniform price lies in between discriminatory prices and price discrimination raises profits relative to uniform pricing. This is in contrast to common findings in existing one-dimensional models featuring best-response asymmetry, suggesting that price discrimination can have qualitatively different implications in one- and multi-dimensional models. Second, price discrimination on one and the same dimension is the likely outcome when price discrimination decisions are endogenized using a two-stage discrimination-then-pricing game. Correspondingly, an observation of one-dimensional price discrimination in practice does not necessarily indicate that the underlying model should be one-dimensional.     

CONTINUOUS CROSS SUBSIDIES AND QUANTITY RESTRICTIONS*

This article provides a model of loss leader pricing and quantity restrictions for a competitive multiproduct industry when individual consumers have continuous (and independent) demands for the set of available goods. Utilizing a generalization of the model proposed by Bliss [1988] , we demonstrate the importance of consumer heterogeneity for the existence of cross subsidies when there is complete information and individual consumers have smooth, downward sloping demands. Continuous cross subsidies arising from consumer heterogeneity are also shown to exist in Hotelling models. Our use of continuous rather than ‘unit’ demands allows us to analyze issues related to welfare, which in turn exposes a strong incentive for the firm to place binding quantity restrictions on consumers. We also show how the presence of quantity restrictions can be used to distinguish between continuous cross subsidies arising from heterogeneous consumers versus those arising from classic demand complementarity with homogeneous agents.     

Personalized pricing and price fairness

Mobile web technology enables discriminatory, or personalized, pricing for many more consumer good categories than has traditionally been the case. Setting prices according to individual valuations, however, generates adverse consumer reaction unless consumers are invited to participate in the price-formation process. Consumer perceptions of price fairness are key to the sustainability of any discriminatory pricing regime. Perceptions of price fairness, in turn, are hypothesized to be shaped by “self-interested inequity aversion” in which prices tend to be regarded as unfair, and purchase probabilities fall, if others are perceived to pay a lower price, while prices tend to be regarded as more fair, and consumers more likely to purchase, if inequity is in the buyers favor. Our experimental data also shows that the implications of inequity aversion for sellers can be at least partially reversed if consumers are allowed to participate in the price-formation process by negotiating the price they pay. The primary implication of our findings is that, in order to be viable, any system of discriminatory pricing for consumer goods should invite consumers to have a stake in the price they pay. Such participatory pricing may provide one way out of the current trap of Hi–Lo, or promotional, pricing that neither retailers nor manufacturers regard as sustainable.     

Estimating demand elasticities using nonlinear pricing

Nonlinear pricing is prevalent in industries such as health care, public utilities, and telecommunications. However, this pricing scheme introduces bias into estimating elasticities for welfare analysis or policy changes. I develop a local elasticity estimation method that uses nonlinear price schedules to isolate consumers' expenditure choices from selection and simultaneity biases. This method improves over previous approaches by using commonly-available observational data and requiring only a single general monotonicity assumption. Using claims-level data on health insurance with two nonlinearities, I am able to measure two separate elasticities, and find that elasticity declines from − 0.26 to− 0.09 by the second nonlinearity. These estimates are then used to calculate moral hazard deadweight loss. This method enables estimation of many policies with nonlinear pricing which previous tools could not address.     

Platform Pricing at Sports Card Conventions

We study a new data set of U.S. sports card conventions from the perspective of the pricing theory of two‐sided markets. Conventions are two‐sided because organizers must set fees to attract both consumers and dealers. We present several findings: first, consumer pricing decreases with competition, but pricing to dealers is insensitive to competition and in longer distances even increases with competition. Second, when consumer price is zero (and thus constrained), dealer price decreases more strongly with competition. These results are compatible with existing models of two‐sided markets, but are difficult to explain without such models.     

Mitigating Monopoly or Preventing Discrimination: Comparing Antitrust to Regulatory Goals in the Interstate Commerce Act

The Interstate Commerce Act and Sherman Antitrust Act were passed within 3 years of each other. Although regulation and antitrust both address market power, the ICA and Sherman Act had different objectives. After a minimal reference to just and reasonable prices, the ICA focused on preventing price discrimination in rail. No posited Sherman Act goal—inequality, consumer welfare, efficiency—is in the ICA. Priority of discrimination in the ICA, however, is predictable. Shippers would care less about absolute rates—which can be passed on to final consumers—and more about preventing rivals from gaining advantages through input price discounts.     

Direct Welfare Analysis of Relative Price Regulation*

The paper synthesizes and develops the welfare analysis of regulating relative prices, for example price differences, of which banning price discrimination is a special case. Welfare results are derived directly by convexity arguments using functions of welfare levels. The method is also used to obtain results about effects on consumer surplus.     

What types of switching costs to create under behavior-based price discrimination?

We study firms' incentives to create switching costs using a four-period model consisting of two consecutive price-competing stages intervened by options to create switching costs early (before price competition) and late (during price competition). Acknowledging that many real/social switching costs need to be created early while many contractual/pecuniary switching costs are set up late during the competition, we show that firms are better off minimizing real/social switching costs while maximizing contractual/pecuniary switching costs. The results highlight the importance of timing of creation that is embedded in different types of switching costs. We also show that switching costs can actually benefit consumers when firms practice behavior-based price discrimination because consumers can enjoy benefits of deep price discounts without the hassle of actually switching. Therefore, an observed lack of consumer switching should not be immediately interpreted as lack of competition in markets where both switching costs and behavior-based pricing exist.     

Why Do Suppliers Charge Larger Buyers Lower Prices?

The phenomenon of input suppliers charging larger buyer firms, relative to smaller buyer firms, lower prices is commonly explained in terms of supplier economies of scale, supplier competition for larger buyers, and the larger bargaining power of larger buyers. This paper provides an alternative explanation, and shows that the observed direction of differential pricing can benefit the supplier by lowering the level of tacit collusion its buyers can sustain in their output market. This result also provides a new mechanism through which a ban on price discrimination by input suppliers may lower consumer welfare.