We study competition by firms that simultaneously post (potentially nonlinear) tariffs to consumers who are privately informed about their tastes. Market power stems from informational frictions, in that consumers are heterogeneously informed about firms’ offers. In the absence of regulation, all firms offer quantity discounts. As a result, relative to Bertrand pricing, imperfect competition benefits disproportionately more consumers whose willingness to pay is high, rather than low. Regulation imposing linear pricing hurts the former but benefits the latter consumers. While consumer surplus increases, firms’ profits decrease, enough to drive down utilitarian welfare. By contrast, improvements in market transparency increase utilitarian welfare, and achieve similar gains on consumer surplus as imposing linear pricing, although with limited distributive impact. On normative grounds, our analysis suggests that banning price discrimination is warranted only if its distributive benefits have a weight on the societal objective.

我们研究了同时向私下了解其品味的消费者发布（可能是非线性的）关税的公司的竞争。市场力量源于信息摩擦，因为消费者对公司的报价有不同程度的了解。在没有监管的情况下，所有公司都提供数量折扣。因此，相对于 Bertrand 定价，不完全竞争使支付意愿高而不是低的消费者不成比例地受益。实施线性定价的监管损害了前者，但有利于后者的消费者。当消费者剩余增加时，企业的利润减少，足以压低功利主义福利。相比之下，市场透明度的提高会增加功利主义的福利，并在消费者剩余方面获得与实施线性定价类似的收益，尽管分配影响有限。从规范的角度来看，我们的分析表明，只有当价格歧视的分配利益对社会目标产生影响时，才有必要禁止价格歧视。