Author: Haggai Porat
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The legal literature on price discrimination focuses primarily on consumers' immutable features, like when higher interest rates are offered to black borrowers and higher prices to women at car dealerships. This paper examines a different type of discriminatory pricing practice: behavior-based pricing (BBP), where prices are set based on consumers' behavior, most prominently their prior purchasing decisions. The increased use of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to set prices has facilitated the growing penetration of BBP in various markets. Unlike race-based and sex-based discrimination, with BBP, consumers can strategically adjust their behavior to impact the prices they will be offered in the future. Sellers, in turn, can adjust prices in early periods to influence consumers' purchasing decisions so as to increase the informational value of these decisions and thereby maximize profits. This paper analyzes possible legal responses to BBP and arrives at three surprising policy implications: One, when non-BBP discrimination is efficient but with potentially problematic distributional implications, BBP can either increase or decrease efficiency. Two, even if BBP is desirable, mandating its disclosure may reduce overall welfare even though this would reduce informational asymmetry in the market. Three, a right to be forgotten (a right to erasure) may be desirable even though it increases informational asymmetry.
Author: Rosa Branca Esteves
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This paper offers a complete picture of the impact of behavior-based price discrimination on profits, consumer surplus, and welfare in markets with a general demand function, where consumers and firms can discount the future at different discount factors. Regardless of the demand function considered, in comparison to uniform pricing, BBPD reduces firmsí second-period prices and profits. In contrast, we show that new results arise regarding the impact of BBPD on first-period prices. Under perfectly inelastic and CES demand, the firm-side e§ect is null and the consumer-side e§ect fully explains the increase in first-period prices. This is no longer the case when the price elasticity of demand varies with price level. Specifically, we show that the firm-side effect can lead firms to raise first-period prices, even when consumers are myopic. We also show that, depending on the demand function considered, the consumer side effect can act to reduce or increase first-period prices. The overall impact of BBPD on first-period prices depends on the interplay between these two effects. Our analysis reveals that the output effect and consumer switching play an important role in explaining the impact of BBPD on welfare. When discount factors are equal, BBPD may have a positive or negative impact on consumer surplus and social welfare, which contrasts with the result that BBPD is beneficial for consumers under a unit and CES demand. For a linear demand function, we identify the regions for firms and consumers discount factors where BBPD can simultaneously enhance or reduce total discounted profits, consumer surplus, and social welfare.
Author: Inge Graef
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 20
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Book Description
While algorithms bring about benefits for consumers in the form of more efficient price setting, concerns have also been expressed about possible adverse effects including discrimination. The paper takes a competition law perspective in analysing a type of discrimination that is said to be facilitated by the use of algorithms, namely personalised pricing. This is a form of price discrimination between consumers whereby a firm charges each consumer a different price depending on willingness to pay. As the advent of data analytics and algorithm-based services has made it easier for firms to engage in price discrimination, a clarification of the latter's legality under competition law is to be welcomed. As such, the paper discusses the extent to which competition enforcement can be considered desirable to target price discrimination towards end consumers. In this regard, attention is also paid to the interaction with other regimes such as data protection, consumer protection and antidiscrimination law.
Author: Stefano Colombo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
In this article, we develop a model encompassing behavior-based discriminatory pricing as a limit case of a more general framework where firms have incomplete information about consumers' purchase histories. We show that information accuracy has a nonmonotonic impact on profits and the worst situation for firms is when information accuracy is intermediate. We also discuss welfare and consumer surplus implications of information accuracy. Although welfare monotonically decreases with the level of information accuracy, there is an inverse U-shape relationship between consumers surplus and information accuracy.
Author: Stefano Colombo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
We develop a model of behavior- and characteristic-based discriminatory pricing where consumers are heterogeneous both in tastes and in price sensitivity. Each firm is able to distinguish between the consumers that have bought from it and those that have bought from the rival. Furthermore, each firm learns the price sensitivity of their own consumers. We show that using this additional information may yield higher profits than uniform pricing provided that consumers are heterogeneous enough with respect to price sensitivity. We also discuss consumer surplus implications of such behavior- and characteristic-based price discrimination, and we show that the impact of price discrimination depends on both the consumer type and the level of consumers' heterogeneity.
Author: Ariel Ezrachi
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674545478
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 365
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Book Description
“A fascinating book about how platform internet companies (Amazon, Facebook, and so on) are changing the norms of economic competition.” —Fast Company Shoppers with a bargain-hunting impulse and internet access can find a universe of products at their fingertips. But is there a dark side to internet commerce? This thought-provoking exposé invites us to explore how sophisticated algorithms and data-crunching are changing the nature of market competition, and not always for the better. Introducing into the policy lexicon terms such as algorithmic collusion, behavioral discrimination, and super-platforms, Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice E. Stucke explore the resulting impact on competition, our democratic ideals, our wallets, and our well-being. “We owe the authors our deep gratitude for anticipating and explaining the consequences of living in a world in which black boxes collude and leave no trails behind. They make it clear that in a world of big data and algorithmic pricing, consumers are outgunned and antitrust laws are outdated, especially in the United States.” —Science “A convincing argument that there can be a darker side to the growth of digital commerce. The replacement of the invisible hand of competition by the digitized hand of internet commerce can give rise to anticompetitive behavior that the competition authorities are ill equipped to deal with.” —Burton G. Malkiel, Wall Street Journal “A convincing case for the need to rethink competition law to cope with algorithmic capitalism’s potential for malfeasance.” —John Naughton, The Observer
Author: Woodrow Barfield
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108663184
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 1327
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Book Description
Algorithms are a fundamental building block of artificial intelligence - and, increasingly, society - but our legal institutions have largely failed to recognize or respond to this reality. The Cambridge Handbook of the Law of Algorithms, which features contributions from US, EU, and Asian legal scholars, discusses the specific challenges algorithms pose not only to current law, but also - as algorithms replace people as decision makers - to the foundations of society itself. The work includes wide coverage of the law as it relates to algorithms, with chapters analyzing how human biases have crept into algorithmic decision-making about who receives housing or credit, the length of sentences for defendants convicted of crimes, and many other decisions that impact constitutionally protected groups. Other issues covered in the work include the impact of algorithms on the law of free speech, intellectual property, and commercial and human rights law.
Author: Martin Ebers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108424821
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
Exploring issues from big-data to robotics, this volume is the first to comprehensively examine the regulatory implications of AI technology.
Author: Robert Bork
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781736089712
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 536
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Book Description
The most important book on antitrust ever written. It shows how antitrust suits adversely affect the consumer by encouraging a costly form of protection for inefficient and uncompetitive small businesses.
Author: Martin Ebers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108677452
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
Algorithms permeate our lives in numerous ways, performing tasks that until recently could only be carried out by humans. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, based on machine learning algorithms and big-data-powered systems, can perform sophisticated tasks such as driving cars, analyzing medical data, and evaluating and executing complex financial transactions - often without active human control or supervision. Algorithms also play an important role in determining retail pricing, online advertising, loan qualification, and airport security. In this work, Martin Ebers and Susana Navas bring together a group of scholars and practitioners from across Europe and the US to analyze how this shift from human actors to computers presents both practical and conceptual challenges for legal and regulatory systems. This book should be read by anyone interested in the intersection between computer science and law, how the law can better regulate algorithmic design, and the legal ramifications for citizens whose behavior is increasingly dictated by algorithms.
