Quality of Information and Oligopolistic Price Discrimination

Recent developments in information technology (IT) have resulted in the collection of a vast amount of customer specific data. As the IT advances the quality of such information improves. We analyze a sequential spatial model of oligopolistic third degree price discrimination where the firms use the available information to classify the consumers into segments and charge each consumer group a different price. Higher information quality increases the number of identifiable consumer groups. Among our findings: i) when the information quality is low, a unilateral commitment not to price discriminate arises in equilibrium, but for high information precision such a commitment is a dominated strategy and the game becomes a prisoners' dilemma and ii) equilibrium profits exhibit a U-shape relationship with the information quality.