On the limitations of data‐based price discrimination
研究了当卖家仅基于样本数据而非完整分布信息设定价格时，三级价格歧视是否仍优于统一定价，发现样本量小和维度诅咒会导致结果不确定。
The classic third degree price discrimination (3PD) model requires the knowledge of the distribution of buyer valuations and the covariate to set the price conditioned on the covariate. In terms of generating revenue, the classic result shows that 3PD is at least as good as uniform pricing. What if the seller has to set a price based only on a sample of observations from the underlying distribution? Is it still obvious that the seller should engage in 3PD? This paper sheds light on these fundamental questions. In particular, the comparison of the revenue performance between 3PD and uniform pricing is ambiguous overall when prices are set based on samples. This finding is in the nature of statistical learning under uncertainty: a curse of dimensionality, but also other small sample complications.