Price Discrimination in Input Markets: Quantity Discounts and Private Information
研究了垄断供应商在下游企业零售成本信息不对称时，歧视性与统一批发定价对福利的影响，发现禁止歧视性批发合同通常有利于社会福利。
We consider a monopolistic supplier’s optimal choice of wholesale tariffs when downstream firms are privately informed about their retail costs. Under discriminatorypricing, downstream firms that differ in their ex ante distribution of retail costs are offered different tariffs. Under uniform pricing, the same wholesale tariff is offered to all downstream firms. In contrast to the extant literature on thirddegree price discrimination with nonlinear wholesale tariffs, we find that banning discriminatory wholesale contracts—the usual legal practice in the EU and US— often is beneficial for social welfare. This result is shown to be robust even when the upstream supplier faces competition in the form of fringe supply.