Personalized pricing is a business strategy to charge different prices to individual consumers based on their characteristics and behaviors. It has become common practice in many industries nowadays due to the availability of a growing amount of high granular consumer data. The discriminatory nature of personalized pricing has triggered heated debates among policymakers and academics on how to design regulation policies to balance market efficiency and equity. In this paper, we propose two sound policy instruments, i.e., capping the range of the personalized prices or their ratios. We investigate the optimal pricing strategy of a profit-maximizing monopoly under both regulatory constraints and the impact of imposing them on consumer surplus, producer surplus, and social welfare. We theoretically prove that both proposed constraints can help balance consumer surplus and producer surplus at the expense of total surplus for common demand distributions, such as uniform, logistic, and exponential distributions. Experiments on both simulation and real-world datasets demonstrate the correctness of these theoretical results. Our findings and insights shed light on regulatory policy design for the increasingly monopolized business in the digital era.

本文提出了两个有声的政策工具，即限制个性化定价的范围或比例，来平衡市场效率和公平性。我们在政策限制下调查了在利润最大化垄断下的最优定价策略，以及实施这些策略对消费者剩余、生产者剩余和社会福利的影响。通过模拟和现实数据集的实验来证明这些理论结果的正确性。这些发现和见解为数字时代日益垄断的企业的监管政策设计提供了启示。

公平个性化定价的监管工具