Tehran Institute for Advanced Studies (TEIAS)

/ When Can Price Discrimination Benefit Consumers? __ Nima Haghpanah

Talk

When Can Price Discrimination Benefit Consumers? (joint with M Farboodi, A Shourideh)

Nima Haghpanah

September 16, 2024
(26 Shahrivar, 1403)

13:30

Venue

Room 3005, Daneshvar Building, Khatam University.
This event will also be live-streamed. Link will be provided to registrants.

Registration Deadline

September 15, 2024

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+982189174612

Nima Haghpanah

Associate Professor of Economics, Penn State University

Overview

The rise of big data technologies has revived the longstanding debate on who reaps the economic benefit of more information, firms or consumers. We study the welfare consequences of monopoly pricing across {all} possible segmentations of a given family of demand curves. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions on this family of demand curves under which the monopolist’s use of information can improve aggregate consumer welfare despite the ensuing price discrimination. Our classification provides insights to guide the recent policy discussion in use of consumer data and sheds light on the type of information that can be allowed in price discrimination.

Biography

haghpanah-nima

Nima Haghpanah is an associate professor of Economics at Penn State. Before joining Penn State in 2016, he received his PhD in Computer Science from Northwestern University in 2014 and was a postdoctoral associate at MIT from 2014 to 2016. He studies mechanism design, information design, and price discrimination. Nima’s research involves developing theoretical frameworks for understanding various economic mechanisms and their applications. He has published in several high-impact journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. His work often explores the intersection of economics and computer science, highlighting his dual expertise in these elds.