主题：Stable Market Segmentation Against Price Discrimination

主讲：邝仲弘，中国人民大学经济学院

时间：2022年4月28日14:00

地点：腾讯会议345-339-175

报告摘要：

In this paper, we consider a novel market segmentation problem capturing the impact of the tag-related regulation on tag-based price discrimination in e-commerce. In contrast to the literature, tag-editable market segmentation (TEMS) is driven by consumer incentives. We apply the collective-decision perspective on the TEMS problem and raise a new concept of stable market segmentation, which captures how the strategic consumers form a market segmentation. We also propose the concept of group stable market segmentation for the scenarios where consumers can collude or interact with each other. We pin down all possible welfare consequences and find that TEMS can have (group) stable market segmentations maximizing the social welfare and consumer surplus. Specifically, the producer surplus remains at the uniform monopoly level in all (group) stable segmentations. Meanwhile, the consumer surplus can reach any value between the maximum consumer surplus and the consumer surplus under the uniform monopoly price. Our result immediately reveals that some (not all) buyer-optimal outcomes can survive under strategic consumers. Moreover, when surplus pairs are located at the efficient frontier, stable and group stable are equivalent definitions. All social-optimal stable segmentations share the same price profile over sub-markets. The price profile can be solved by a polynomial algorithm and used to find all social-optimal stable segmentations. We also incorporate tag-selection cost and the possibility where willingness-to-pay is continuously distributed. Our analysis provides a novel perspective on market-power and privacy regulations in e-commerce: Democratize the market-power regulation by crowdsourcing strategic choices of consumers. Rather than forbidding tag-based price discrimination, the policymaker shall allow and enforce the tag-editable policy.

主讲人简介：

邝仲弘，中国人民大学经济学院助理教授，中国人民大学数字经济研究中心研究员，中国人民大学企业与组织理论研究中心研究员、研讨会协调人。主要研究领域包括博弈论、信息经济学、产业组织理论等领域，发表主要作者论文5篇，主持国家自然科学基金青年基金等纵向项目。