IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/vfsc16/145690.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Fighting Collusion by Permitting Price Discrimination

Author

Listed:
  • Helfrich, Magdalena
  • Herweg, Fabian

Abstract

We investigate the effect of a ban on third-degree price discrimination on the sustainability of collusion. We build a model with two firms that may be able to discriminate between two consumer groups. Two cases are analyzed: (i) Best-response symmetries so that profits in the static Nash equilibrium are higher if price discrimination is allowed. (ii) Best-response asymmetries so that profits in the static Nash equilibrium are lower if price discrimination is allowed. In both cases, firms' discount factor has to be higher in order to sustain collusion in grim-trigger strategies under price discrimination than under uniform pricing.

Suggested Citation

  • Helfrich, Magdalena & Herweg, Fabian, 2016. "Fighting Collusion by Permitting Price Discrimination," VfS Annual Conference 2016 (Augsburg): Demographic Change 145690, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:vfsc16:145690
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/145690/1/VfS_2016_pid_6663.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Monika Schnitzer, 1994. "Dynamic Duopoly with Best-Price Clauses," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 25(1), pages 186-196, Spring.
    2. 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.
    3. Thomas E. Cooper, 1986. "Most-Favored-Customer Pricing and Tacit Collusion," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 17(3), pages 377-388, Autumn.
    4. Colombo, Stefano, 2010. "Product differentiation, price discrimination and collusion," Research in Economics, Elsevier, vol. 64(1), pages 18-27, March.
    5. Blundell,Richard & Newey,Whitney K. & Persson,Torsten (ed.), 2006. "Advances in Economics and Econometrics," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521871525, September.
    6. Stefano Colombo, 2010. "A note on information of firms and collusion," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 30(2), pages 1603-1608.
    7. Thisse, Jacques-Francois & Vives, Xavier, 1988. "On the Strategic Choice of Spatial Price Policy," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 78(1), pages 122-137, March.
    8. Holmes, Thomas J, 1989. "The Effects of Third-Degree Price Discrimination in Oligopoly," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 79(1), pages 244-250, March.
    9. Severin Borenstein, 1985. "Price Discrimination in Free-Entry Markets," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 16(3), pages 380-397, Autumn.
    10. Jihui Chen & Qihong Liu, 2011. "The Effect Of Most‐Favored Customer Clauses On Prices," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 59(3), pages 343-371, September.
    11. Stefano Colombo, 2009. "Sustainability of collusion with imperfect price discrimination and inelastic demand functions," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 29(3), pages 1687-1694.
    12. Mark Armstrong & Robert Porter (ed.), 2007. "Handbook of Industrial Organization," Handbook of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, edition 1, volume 3, number 1.
    13. Blundell,Richard & Newey,Whitney K. & Persson,Torsten (ed.), 2006. "Advances in Economics and Econometrics," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521692083, September.
    14. Liu, Qihong & Serfes, Konstantinos, 2007. "Market segmentation and collusive behavior," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 25(2), pages 355-378, April.
    15. 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.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Stefano Colombo & Aldo Pignataro, 2022. "Information accuracy and collusion," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 31(3), pages 638-656, August.
    2. Colombo, Stefano & Filippini, Luigi & Pignataro, Aldo, 2024. "Information sharing, personalized pricing, and collusion," Information Economics and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 66(C).
    3. John S. Heywood & Dongyang Li & Guangliang Ye, 2021. "Spatial pricing and collusion," Metroeconomica, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 72(2), pages 425-440, May.
    4. Florian Gössl & Alexander Rasch, 2020. "Collusion under different pricing schemes," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 29(4), pages 910-931, October.
    5. Florian Peiseler & Alexander Rasch & Shiva Shekhar, 2022. "Imperfect information, algorithmic price discrimination, and collusion," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 124(2), pages 516-549, April.
    6. Peiseler, Florian & Rasch, Alexander & Shekhar, Shiva, 2018. "Private information, price discrimination, and collusion," DICE Discussion Papers 295, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE).
    7. Axel Gautier & Ashwin Ittoo & Pieter Cleynenbreugel, 2020. "AI algorithms, price discrimination and collusion: a technological, economic and legal perspective," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 50(3), pages 405-435, December.
    8. John S. Heywood & Dongyang Li & Guangliang Ye, 2020. "Does price discrimination make collusion less likely? a delivered pricing model," Journal of Economics, Springer, vol. 131(1), pages 39-60, September.
    9. Döpper, Hendrik & Rasch, Alexander, 2022. "Combinable products, price discrimination, and collusion," DICE Discussion Papers 377, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE).
    10. Schlütter, Frank, 2022. "Managing Seller Conduct in Online Marketplaces and Platform Most-Favored Nation Clauses," LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE 2022026, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
    11. Döpper, Hendrik & Rasch, Alexander, 2024. "Combinable products, price discrimination, and collusion," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 94(C).

    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. Dobson, Paul W. & Waterson, Michael, 2008. "Chain-Store Competition: Customized vs. Uniform Pricing," Economic Research Papers 269789, University of Warwick - Department of Economics.
    2. Simshauser, Paul, 2018. "Price discrimination and the modes of failure in deregulated retail electricity markets," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 75(C), pages 54-70.
    3. 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.
    4. Stefano Colombo, 2011. "Pricing Policy and Partial Collusion," Journal of Industry, Competition and Trade, Springer, vol. 11(4), pages 325-349, December.
    5. 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.
    6. Rosa Branca Esteves, 2009. "A Survey on the Economics of Behaviour-Based Price Discrimination," NIPE Working Papers 5/2009, NIPE - Universidade do Minho.
    7. 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.
    8. Liu, Qihong & Shuai, Jie, 2013. "Multi-dimensional price discrimination," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 31(5), pages 417-428.
    9. 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.
    10. Takanori Adachi & Noriaki Matsushima, 2014. "The Welfare Effects Of Third-Degree Price Discrimination In A Differentiated Oligopoly," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 52(3), pages 1231-1244, July.
    11. Bouckaert, J.M.C. & Degryse, H.A., 2006. "Opt In versus Opt Out : A Free-Entry Analysis of Privacy Policies," Other publications TiSEM 17393c5d-1ed2-47ec-bc96-9, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.
    12. Imke Reimers & Claire (Chunying) Xie, 2019. "Do Coupons Expand or Cannibalize Revenue? Evidence from an e-Market," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 65(1), pages 286-300, January.
    13. 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).
    14. Paul Simshauser & David Downer, 2016. "On the Inequity of Flat-rate Electricity Tariffs," The Energy Journal, , vol. 37(3), pages 199-230, July.
    15. Jean-Pierre H. Dubé & Zheng Fang & Nathan Fong & Xueming Luo, 2016. "Competitive Price Targeting with Smartphone Coupons," NBER Working Papers 22067, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    16. 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.
    17. Rodrigo Montes & Wilfried Sand-Zantman & Tommaso Valletti, 2019. "The Value of Personal Information in Online Markets with Endogenous Privacy," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 65(3), pages 1342-1362, March.
    18. Marc Möller & Makoto Watanabe, 2016. "Competition in the presence of individual demand uncertainty," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 47(2), pages 273-292, May.
    19. Zhijun Chen & Chongwoo Choe & Noriaki Matsushima, 2020. "Competitive Personalized Pricing," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 66(9), pages 4003-4023, September.
    20. 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).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D43 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection
    • K21 - Law and Economics - - Regulation and Business Law - - - Antitrust Law
    • L13 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets

    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:zbw:vfsc16:145690. 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: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfsocea.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.