 The Welfare Effects of Regulating the Number of Market SegmentsYann Braouezec ()
No 2013-ECO-11, Working Papers from IESEG School of Management Abstract: We consider a model in which a profit-maximizing organization called the monopolist faces N _ 2 different (micro) market segments while the number k of market segments is chosen the regulator, where k is an integer between 1 and N. Unless k = 1 or k = N, the monopolist's profit maximization is a mixed-integer programming problem, the solution of which is called the optimal profit policy. When demands are linear, we show that it is always worthwhile to regulate the number of market segments since the value of k that maximizes the social welfare under the optimal profit policy is never greater than a critical threshold _k. This result allows us to disentangle the good aspect of price discrimination, the so-called output effect, from the bad one, that we call the pure profit effect. Further results are provided for the specific case of parallel demands. Non-linear demands are also briefly considered. Keywords: Economics; pricing; market segmentation; direct price discrimination; regulation (search for similar items in EconPapers) There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ies:wpaper:e201311 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from IESEG School of Management Contact information at EDIRC. |
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