Econ Papers Daily / 期刊论文
混合市场中的内生费用设定与数据共享
Data Sharing in Hybrid Marketplaces With Endogenous Fee Setting
摘要
We study a hybrid marketplace where a vertically integrated platform competes with a seller, who pays the platform a transaction fee, in a horizontally differentiated downstream market. The platform has a data advantage that allows it to price discriminate against consumers and can choose to share such data with the seller. First, in a setting where the transaction fee is exogenous, we show that the platform may opt to share data with the seller. However, although data sharing increases total welfare, such practice is never Pareto‐improving: in particular, whenever data sharing increases the platform's profits, it also hurts consumers. Second, we show that, if the platform can endogenously choose the transaction fee, it always shares data, as it sets the fee to avoid competition with the seller, leading to higher profits and lower consumer surplus. This result is robust to a large family of consumer distributions. From a policy perspective, we show how a consumer‐oriented policymaker would prefer to ban the practice of price discrimination altogether, as this policy would also level the playing field while simultaneously avoiding the surplus extraction stemming from price discrimination. Finally, we also discuss the welfare consequences of banning the hybrid business model, and we argue that the incentives of the platform to soften downstream competition to increase surplus extraction would remain qualitatively unchanged.
中文摘要
我们研究一个混合市场，其中纵向一体化平台在横向差异化的下游市场中与向其支付交易费的卖家竞争。平台拥有数据优势，使其能够对消费者进行价格歧视，并可选择是否与卖家共享此类数据。首先，在交易费为外生的设定下，我们表明平台可能选择与卖家共享数据。然而，尽管数据共享提高了总福利，但这种做法从不是帕累托改进的：特别是，当数据共享增加平台利润时，它也会损害消费者。其次，我们表明，如果平台能够内生选择交易费，它总是共享数据，因为它设定费用以避免与卖家竞争，从而导致更高利润和更低消费者剩余。这一结果对一大类消费者分布具有稳健性。从政策角度看，我们表明，以消费者为导向的政策制定者更倾向于完全禁止价格歧视行为，因为这一政策也会创造公平竞争环境，同时避免源于价格歧视的剩余攫取。最后，我们还讨论了禁止混合商业模式的福利后果，并认为平台通过缓和下游竞争以增加剩余攫取的激励在性质上仍将保持不变。