The Optimality of Constant-Markup Pricing (with Tibor Heumann and Stephen Morris)
We consider a nonlinear pricing environment with private information. We provide profit guarantees (and associated mechanisms) that the seller can achieve across all possible distributions of willingness to pay of the buyers. With a constant elasticity cost function, constant markup pricing provides the optimal revenue guarantee across all possible distributions of willingness to pay and the lower bound is attained under a Pareto distribution. We characterize how profits and consumer surplus vary with the distribution of values and show that Pareto distributions are extremal. We also provide a revenue guarantee for general cost functions. We establish equivalent results for optimal procurement policies that support maximal surplus guarantees for the buyer given all possible cost distributions of the sellers.
Date: 28 April 2023, 14:15 (Friday, 1st week, Trinity 2023)
Venue: Manor Road Building, Manor Road OX1 3UQ
Venue Details: Seminar Room G and https://zoom.us/j/93867615769?pwd=VmRJVVRkYlhUajllTEJyd2NsTUs3QT09
Speaker: Dirk Bergemann (Yale University)
Organising department: Department of Economics
Part of: Nuffield Economic Theory Seminar
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Daria Ihnatenko