IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/20399.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Information Acquisition and Price Discrimination

Author

Listed:
  • Fatemi, Farshad

Abstract

We consider a Hotelling model of price competition where firms may acquire costly information regarding the preferences (i.e. “location”) of customers. By purchasing additional information, a firm has a finer partition regarding customer preferences, and its pricing decisions must be measurable with respect to this partition. If information acquisition decisions are common knowledge at the point where firms compete via prices, we show that a pure strategy subgame perfect equilibrium exists, and that there is “excess information acquisition” from the point of view of the firms. If information acquisition decisions are private information, a pure strategy equilibrium fails to exist. We compute a mixed strategy equilibrium for a range of parameter values.

Suggested Citation

  • Fatemi, Farshad, 2010. "Information Acquisition and Price Discrimination," MPRA Paper 20399, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:20399
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/20399/1/MPRA_paper_20399.pdf
    File Function: original version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Qihong Liu & Konstantinos Serfes, 2004. "Quality of Information and Oligopolistic Price Discrimination," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 13(4), pages 671-702, December.
    2. Hamilton, Jonathan & Slutsky, Steven, 2004. "Nonlinear price discrimination with a finite number of consumers and constrained recontracting," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 22(6), pages 737-757, June.
    3. Fudenberg, Drew & Tirole, Jean, 1984. "The Fat-Cat Effect, the Puppy-Dog Ploy, and the Lean and Hungry Look," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 74(2), pages 361-366, May.
    4. Blundell,Richard & Newey,Whitney K. & Persson,Torsten (ed.), 2006. "Advances in Economics and Econometrics," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521871525.
    5. Blundell,Richard & Newey,Whitney K. & Persson,Torsten (ed.), 2006. "Advances in Economics and Econometrics," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521692083.
    6. Qihong Liu & Konstantinos Serfes, 2005. "Imperfect price discrimination, market structure, and efficiency," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 38(4), pages 1191-1203, November.
    7. R. Schmalensee & R. Willig (ed.), 1989. "Handbook of Industrial Organization," Handbook of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, edition 1, volume 1, number 1.
    8. Kenneth S. Corts, 1998. "Third-Degree Price Discrimination in Oligopoly: All-Out Competition and Strategic Commitment," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 29(2), pages 306-323, Summer.
    9. Armstrong, Mark & Vickers, John, 2001. "Competitive Price Discrimination," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 32(4), pages 579-605, Winter.
    10. V. Bhaskar & Ted To, 2004. "Is Perfect Price Discrimination Really Efficient? An Analysis of Free Entry," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 35(4), pages 762-776, Winter.
    11. Bulow, Jeremy I & Geanakoplos, John D & Klemperer, Paul D, 1985. "Multimarket Oligopoly: Strategic Substitutes and Complements," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 93(3), pages 488-511, June.
    12. Armstrong, Mark, 2006. "Price discrimination," MPRA Paper 4693, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    13. Severin Borenstein, 1985. "Price Discrimination in Free-Entry Markets," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 16(3), pages 380-397, Autumn.
    14. R. Schmalensee & R. Willig (ed.), 1989. "Handbook of Industrial Organization," Handbook of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, edition 1, volume 2, number 2.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Rosa Branca Esteves, 2009. "A Survey on the Economics of Behaviour-Based Price Discrimination," NIPE Working Papers 5/2009, NIPE - Universidade do Minho.
    2. Bouckaert, J.M.C. & Degryse, H.A., 2006. "Opt In versus Opt Out : A Free-Entry Analysis of Privacy Policies," Discussion Paper 2006-96, Tilburg University, Center for Economic Research.
    3. Dobson, Paul W. & Waterson, Michael, 2008. "Chain-Store Competition: Customized vs. Uniform Pricing," Economic Research Papers 269789, University of Warwick - Department of Economics.
    4. Stole, Lars A., 2007. "Price Discrimination and Competition," Handbook of Industrial Organization, in: Mark Armstrong & Robert Porter (ed.), Handbook of Industrial Organization, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 34, pages 2221-2299, Elsevier.
    5. Griva, Krina & Vettas, Nikolaos, 2015. "On two-part tariff competition in a homogeneous product duopoly," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 41(C), pages 30-41.
    6. Belleflamme,Paul & Peitz,Martin, 2015. "Industrial Organization," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9781107687899.
    7. Jentzsch, Nicola & Sapi, Geza & Suleymanova, Irina, 2013. "Targeted pricing and customer data sharing among rivals," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 31(2), pages 131-144.
    8. Luís Cabral, 2018. "We’re Number 1: Price Wars for Market Share Leadership," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 64(5), pages 2013-2030, May.
    9. Simshauser, Paul & Whish-Wilson, Patrick, 2017. "Price discrimination in Australia's retail electricity markets: An analysis of Victoria & Southeast Queensland," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 62(C), pages 92-103.
    10. Aguirre Pérez, Iñaki, 2011. "Multimarket Competition and Welfare Effects of Price discrimination," IKERLANAK info:eu-repo/grantAgreeme, Universidad del País Vasco - Departamento de Fundamentos del Análisis Económico I.
    11. Baye, Irina & Reiz, Tim & Sapi, Geza, 2018. "Customer recognition and mobile geo-targeting," DICE Discussion Papers 285, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE).
    12. Jan Bouckaert & Hans Degryse, 2013. "Default Options and Social Welfare: Opt In versus Opt Out," Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE), Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, vol. 169(3), pages 468-489, September.
    13. Colombo, Stefano, 2009. "On the effects of selective below-cost pricing in a vertical differentiation model," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal (2007-2020), Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel), vol. 3, pages 1-13.
    14. Xiangkang Yin, 2013. "Two-part tariffs set by a risk-averse monopolist," Journal of Economics, Springer, vol. 109(2), pages 175-192, June.
    15. Stefano Colombo, 2011. "Pricing Policy and Partial Collusion," Journal of Industry, Competition and Trade, Springer, vol. 11(4), pages 325-349, December.
    16. Mark Armstrong, 2005. "Recent Developments in the Economics of Price Discrimination," Industrial Organization 0511004, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    17. Jean-Pierre Dubé & Zheng Fang & Nathan Fong & Xueming Luo, 2017. "Competitive Price Targeting with Smartphone Coupons," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 36(6), pages 944-975, November.
    18. Li, Youping & Shuai, Jie, 2019. "Monopolistic competition, price discrimination and welfare," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 174(C), pages 114-117.
    19. Sapi, Geza & Suleymanova, Irina, 2013. "Consumer flexibility, data quality and targeted pricing," DICE Discussion Papers 117, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE).
    20. Liu, Qihong & Shuai, Jie, 2013. "Multi-dimensional price discrimination," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 31(5), pages 417-428.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Information Acquisition; Price Discrimination;

    JEL classification:

    • L13 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • D43 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:20399. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Joachim Winter (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.