Market Segmentation, Information Sale, and Information Foreclosure

Emanuele Tarantino, Stefan Terstiege and Adrien Vigier

No 18691, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: We study the sale of consumer data allowing firms to engage in discriminatory pricing. When an independent data intermediary sells information, the consumer surplus is as if all firms were fully informed. We then consider the case where the data intermediary also competes in the final goods market. We show that the integrated data intermediary may choose not to sell full information to its rivals; this strategic behavior lowers consumer surplus. We study the industry’s equilibrium structure and show that acquiring a firm by an independent data intermediary always reduces consumer surplus. We apply the insights of our analysis to the debate on self-preferencing in the digital advertising industry.

JEL-codes: D42 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-12
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP18691 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:18691

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP18691

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().