Rakesh Vohra, who much to the regret of many of us at MEDS has recently moved on to a new and prestigious position, pointed out a clever paper today by Bergemann, Brooks and Morris (the first and third names you surely know, the second is a theorist on this year’s market). Beyond some clever uses of linear algebra in the proofs, the results of the paper are in and of themselves very interesting. The question is the following: if a regulator, or a third party, can segment consumers by willingness-to-pay and provide that information to a monopolist, what are the effects on welfare and profits?
In a limited sense, this is an old question. Monopolies generate deadweight loss as they sell at a price above marginal cost. Monopolies that can perfectly price discriminate remove that deadweight loss but also steal all of the consumer surplus. Depending on your social welfare function, this may be a good or bad thing. When markets can be segmented (i.e., third degree price discrimination) with no chance of arbitrage, we know that monopolist profits are weakly higher since the uniform monopoly price could be maintained in both markets, but the effect on consumer surplus is ambiguous.
Bergemann et al provide two really interesting results. First, if you can choose the segmentation, it is always possible to segment consumers such that monopoly profits are just the profits gained under the uniform price, but quantity sold is nonetheless efficient. Further, there exist segmentations such that producer surplus P is anything between the uniform price profit P* and the perfect price discrimination profit P**, and such that consumer surplus plus consumer surplus P+C is anything between P* and P**! This seems like magic, but the method is actually pretty intuitive.
Let’s generate the first case, where producer profit is the uniform price profit P* and consumer surplus is maximal, C=P**-P*. In any segmentation, the monopolist can always charge P* to every segment. So if we want consumers to capture all of the surplus, there can’t be “too many” high-value consumers in a segment, since otherwise the monopolist would raise their price above P*. Let there be 3 consumer types, with the total market uniformly distributed across the three, such that valuations are 1, 2 and 3. Let marginal cost be constant at zero. The profit-maximizing price is 2, earning the monopolist 2*(2/3)=4/3. But what if we tell the monopolist that consumers can either be Class A or Class B. Class A consists of all consumers with willingness-to-pay 1 and exactly enough consumers with WTP 2 and 3 that the monopolist is just indifferent between choosing price 1 or price 2 for Class A. Class B consists of the rest of the types 2 and 3 (and since the relative proportion of type 2 and 3 in this Class is the same as in the market as a whole, where we already know the profit maximizing price is 2 with only types 2 and 3 buying, the profit maximizing price remains 2 here). Some quick algebra shows that if Class A consists of all of the WTP 1 consumers and exactly 1/2 of the WTP 2 and 3 consumers, then the monopolist is indifferent between charging 1 and 2 to Class A, and charges 2 to Class B. Therefore, it is an equilibrium for all consumers to buy the good, the monopolist to earn uniform price profits P*, and consumer surplus to be maximized. The paper formally proves that this intuition holds for general assumptions about (possibly continuous) consumer valuations.
The other two “corner cases” for bundles of consumer and producer surplus are also easy to construct. Maximal producer surplus P** with consumer surplus 0 is simply the case of perfect price discrimination: the producer knows every consumer’s exact willingness-to-pay. Uniform price producer surplus P* and consumer surplus 0 is constructed by mixing the very low WTP consumers with all of the very high types (along with some subset of consumers with less extreme valuations), such that the monopolist is indifferent between charging the monopolist price or just charging the high type price so that everyone below the high type does not buy. Then mix the next highest WTP types with low but not quite as low WTP types, and continue iteratively. A simple argument based on a property of convex sets allows mixtures of P and C outside the corner cases; Rakesh has provided an even more intuitive proof than that given in the paper.
Now how do we use this result in policy? At a first pass, since information is always good for the seller (weakly) and ambiguous for the consumer, a policymaker should be particularly worried about bundlers providing information about willingness-to-pay that is expected to drastically lower consumer surplus while only improving rent extraction by sellers a small bit. More works needs to be done in specific cases, but the mathematical setup in this paper provides a very straightforward path for such applied analysis. It seems intuitive that precise information about consumers with willigness-to-pay below the monopoly price is unambiguously good for welfare, whereas information bundles that contain a lot of high WTP consumers but also a relatively large number of lower WTP consumers will lower total quantity sold and hence social surplus.
I am also curious about the limits of price discrimination in the oligopoly case. In general, the ability to price discriminate (even perfectly!) can be very good for consumers under oligopoly. The intuition is that under uniform pricing, I trade-off stealing your buyers by lowering prices against earning less from my current buyers; the ability to price discriminate allows me to target your buyers without worrying about the effect on my own current buyers, hence the reaction curves are steeper, hence consumer surplus tends to increase (see Section 7 of Mark Armstrong’s review of the price discrimination literature). With arbitrary third degree price discrimination, however, I imagine mathematics similar to that in the present paper could prove similarly elucidating.
A Fine Theorem 