Abstract
A monopoly seller is privately and imperfectly informed about the buyer's value of the product. A designer can provide the seller with additional information, which the seller uses to price discriminate the buyer. We demonstrate the difficulty of screening the seller's information: When the buyer's value is binary, no combination of buyer surplus and seller profit can be implemented other than those achieved by providing the same information to all seller types. We use the result to characterize the set of implementable welfare outcomes and demonstrate the trade-off between buyer surplus and efficiency.
Replaces
Shota Ichihashi, and Alex Smolin, “Data Collection by an Informed Seller”, TSE Working Paper, n. 22-1330, April 2022.
Reference
Shota Ichihashi, and Alex Smolin, “Data Provision to an Informed Seller”, Games and Economic Behavior, vol. 153, October 2025, pp. 131–144.
Published in
Games and Economic Behavior, vol. 153, October 2025, pp. 131–144