Oligopoly under incomplete information: on the welfare effects of price discrimination - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue International Journal of Industrial Organization Année : 2021

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

Renato Gomes
  • Fonction : Auteur
  • PersonId : 1140204
Lucas Maestri
  • Fonction : Auteur
  • PersonId : 1122211

Résumé

We study competition by firms that simultaneously post (potentially nonlinear) taris to consumers who are privately informed about their tastes. Market power stems from informational frictions, in that consumers are heterogeneously informed about firms' oers. In the absence of regulation, all firms oer 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.
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
comp_search_21_03_26.pdf (534.96 Ko) Télécharger le fichier
Origine Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)

Dates et versions

hal-03515749 , version 1 (06-01-2022)

Identifiants

Citer

Daniel F. Garrett, Renato Gomes, Lucas Maestri. Oligopoly under incomplete information: on the welfare effects of price discrimination. International Journal of Industrial Organization, 2021, 79, ⟨10.1016/j.ijindorg.2021.102735⟩. ⟨hal-03515749⟩
137 Consultations
160 Téléchargements

Altmetric

Partager

Gmail Mastodon Facebook X LinkedIn More