When product quality is unknown, a natural supposition is that having more consumers informed will increase consumer surplus and welfare. However, when a monopolist is selling a product of unknown quality, welfare can decrease in the fraction of informed consumers

Abstract We study the welfare implications of personalized pricing, an extreme form of third-degree price discrimination implemented with machine learning for a large, digital firm. We conduct a randomized controlled pricing field experiment to train a demand model and to conduct inferences...

This brief essay addresses the ambiguities in the meaning of “consumer welfare” in antitrust, exploring the differences between the Williamson, Bork, and current understanding of that term. After weighing the alternatives it argues that the consumer welfare principle in antitrust should seek...

This paper studies consumers' incentives to hide their purchase histories when the seller's prices depend on previous behavior. Through distinct channels, hiding both hinders and facilitates trade. Indeed, the social optimum involves hiding to some extent, yet not fully. Two opposing effects...

Consumer co-operatives constitute a highly successful example of democratic forms of enterprises operating in developed countries. They are usually organized as medium or large-scale firms competing with profit-seeking firms in retail industries. In this paper we model such a situation as a...