The process of digitization has already had a profound impact on the functioning of the markets in the last decade, and it should bring even more interesting changes in the near future. This Special Issue on the Economics of Digitization includes four selected articles, which illustrate the implications of various aspects of digitization for consumers and firms. The analysis of price discrimination has recently taken a new – and very interesting – turn, almost one century after the concept was formally introduced (Pigou proposed the first taxonomy of price discrimination practices in his book “Economics of Welfare” in 1920). The reason for this renewed interest is to be found in the continuously decreasing costs of processing data and in improved data algorithms, which allow firms to know much more about their consumers’ willingness to pay. These technological developments have four important consequences for the economic analysis of price discrimination. First, perfect price discrimination is no longer seen as a theoretical benchmark but as a true possibility. Second, as consumers care about their privacy and can act to protect it, they become strategic players, meaning that firms must factor in the consumers’ potential reactions when they choose their pricing strategy. Third, as more firms can easily collect and process data, a more careful examination of competitive price discrimination is called for. Finally, as data is the necessary input for price discrimination, it becomes a commodity, whose trade needs to be analyzed. The article by Alexandre de Cornière and Rodrigo Montes (Consumer Privacy and the Incentives to Price-Discriminate in Online Markets) contributes to the first two issues: it studies the interaction between a monopoly firm, which can (imperfectly) identify consumers’ willingness to pay, and consumers, who can prevent

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《数字化经济学》特刊

在过去的十年中，数字化进程已经对市场的运作产生了深远的影响，并且它将在不久的将来带来更加有趣的变化。本期《数字化经济学特刊》包括四篇精选文章，这些文章说明了数字化各个方面对消费者和企业的影响。价格歧视的分析在一个概念被正式引入近一个世纪之后（Pigou在1920年出版的《福利经济》中提出了价格歧视行为的第一个分类法），这是一个非常有趣的新转折。重新引起兴趣的原因在于不断降低的处理数据成本和改进的数据算法，这使公司可以更加了解其消费者的支付意愿。这些技术发展对价格歧视的经济分析产生了四个重要的后果。首先，完美的价格歧视不再被视为理论基准，而是一种真实的可能性。其次，当消费者关心自己的隐私并可以采取行动保护自己的隐私时，他们便成为战略参与者，这意味着企业在选择定价策略时必须考虑消费者的潜在反应。第三，随着越来越多的公司可以轻松地收集和处理数据，需要对竞争性价格歧视进行更仔细的研究。最后，由于数据是进行价格歧视的必要输入，因此它成为一种商品，需要对其贸易进行分析。