【Empirical Seminar】Dispersion, Discrimination, and the Price of Your Pickup
2024/11/27
研討會日期 : 2024-11-27
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Stephan Sagl
地點 : Conference Room B110
主持人 : Professor Han Loong Ng
演講者簡介 : Professor Stephan Sagl received his Ph.D. in Economics from the Pennsylvania State University in 2024. He is an Assistant Professor at the Indiana University. His research interests are Industrial Organization and Applied Microeconomics.
演講摘要 : Using repeat purchase data on pickup trucks, I establish that the same consumers pay persistently high or persistently low prices across vehicle purchases. Less than 1% of this persistence can be explained by demographics. This result suggests that dealers use consumer information beyond coarse demographics to personalize prices. Using a novel discrete choice model with personalized pricing, I study the role of consumer information firms use for pricing in the welfare effects of price discrimination. To do so, I overcome a common problem in settings with transaction data: personalized prices of non-chosen alternatives are unobservable. I solve this problem by recovering unobserved personalized prices and consumer-specific price sensitivity from the observed transaction price via firms' first-order conditions. I simulate two counterfactuals: uniform pricing and price discrimination based on coarse demographic groups. Compared to uniform pricing, personalized pricing increases profits and total welfare but, on average, harms consumers. On the other hand, compared to uniform pricing, price discrimination based only on demographics is not profitable. This highlights the importance of the amount of consumer information firms can use for pricing in the welfare effects of price discrimination.
