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Robust Price Discrimination

Author

Listed:
  • Itai Arieli
  • Yakov Babichenko
  • Omer Madmon
  • Moshe Tennenholtz

Abstract

We consider a model of third-degree price discrimination, in which the seller has a valuation for the product which is unknown to the market designer, who aims to maximize the buyers' surplus by revealing information regarding the buyer's valuation to the seller. Our main result shows that the regret is bounded by $U^*(0)/e$, where $U^*(0)$ is the optimal buyer surplus in the case where the seller has zero valuation for the product. This bound is attained by randomly drawing a seller valuation and applying the segmentation of Bergemann et al. (2015) with respect to the drawn valuation. We show that the $U^*(0)/e$ bound is tight in the case of binary buyer valuation.

Suggested Citation

  • Itai Arieli & Yakov Babichenko & Omer Madmon & Moshe Tennenholtz, 2024. "Robust Price Discrimination," Papers 2401.16942, arXiv.org, revised Feb 2024.
  • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2401.16942
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Dirk Bergemann & Benjamin Brooks & Stephen Morris, 2015. "The Limits of Price Discrimination," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 105(3), pages 921-957, March.
    2. Myerson, Roger B. & Satterthwaite, Mark A., 1983. "Efficient mechanisms for bilateral trading," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 29(2), pages 265-281, April.
    3. Alex Coad, 2009. "On the distribution of product price and quality," Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Springer, vol. 19(4), pages 589-604, August.
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