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Personalized Pricing and Competition

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  • Rhodes, Andrew
  • Zhou, Jidong

Abstract

We study personalized pricing in a general oligopoly model. The impact of personalized pricing relative to uniform pricing hinges on the degree of market coverage. If market conditions are such that coverage is high (e.g., the production cost is low, or the number of firms is high), personalized pricing harms firms and benefits consumers, whereas the opposite is true if coverage is low. When only some firms have data to personalize prices, consumers can be worse off compared to when either all or no firms personalize prices.

Suggested Citation

  • Rhodes, Andrew & Zhou, Jidong, 2022. "Personalized Pricing and Competition," TSE Working Papers 22-1333, Toulouse School of Economics (TSE), revised Mar 2024.
    • Handle: RePEc:tse:wpaper:126889
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    Cited by:

    1. Foros, Øystein & Kind, Hans Jarle & Nguyen-Ones, Mai, 2024. "The choice of pricing format: Firms may choose uniform pricing over personalized pricing to induce rivals to soften competition," Information Economics and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 66(C).
    2. Brian C. Albrecht & Mark Whitmeyer, 2023. "Comparison Shopping: Learning Before Buying From Duopolists," Papers 2302.06580, arXiv.org, revised Apr 2023.
    3. Groh, Carl-Christian, 2023. "Search, Data, and Market Power," VfS Annual Conference 2023 (Regensburg): Growth and the "sociale Frage" 277701, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    4. Navarra, Federico & Pino, Flavio & Sandrini, Luca, 2024. "Mandated data-sharing in hybrid marketplaces," ZEW Discussion Papers 24-051, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    5. Wenjie Bi & Bing Wang & Haiying Liu, 2024. "Personalized Dynamic Pricing Based on Improved Thompson Sampling," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 12(8), pages 1-14, April.
    6. Qiuyu Lu & Noriaki Matsushima, 2023. "Personalized pricing when consumers can purchase multiple items," ISER Discussion Paper 1192, Institute of Social and Economic Research, Osaka University.
    7. Adachi, Takanori, 2023. "A sufficient statistics approach for welfare analysis of oligopolistic third‐degree price discrimination," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 86(C).
    8. Carl-Christian Groh, & Jonas von Wangenheim, 2024. "Pigou Meets Wolinsky: Search, Price Discrimination, and Consumer Sophistication," CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series crctr224_2024_527, University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany.
    9. Qiuyu Lu & Noriaki Matsushima & Shiva Shekhar, 2024. "Welfare Implications of Personalized Pricing in Competitive Platform Markets: The Role of Network Effects," CESifo Working Paper Series 10994, CESifo.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    personalized pricing; competition; price discrimination; consumer data;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

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

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