Data provision to an informed seller
A monopoly seller is privately and imperfectly informed about the buyer's value of the product. A designer can provide the seller with additional information, which the seller uses to price discriminate the buyer. We demonstrate the difficulty of screening the seller's information: When the buyer's value is binary, no combination of buyer surplus and seller profit can be implemented other than those achieved by providing the same information to all seller types. We use the result to characterize the set of implementable welfare outcomes and demonstrate the trade-off between buyer surplus and efficiency.
Authors
- Alex Smolin (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4740-2376)
- Shota Ichihashi (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6812-282X)
Institutions
- Queen's University (CA)
- Toulouse School of Economics (FR)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Games and Economic Behavior
- Published
- 2025-06-11
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geb.2025.06.002
- Citations
- 1
- Primary Topic
- Consumer Market Behavior and Pricing
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 2.07
Funders
- Carnegie Mellon University
- Agence Nationale de la Recherche
- Concordia University
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- University of California, Irvine
- Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College