A Taxonomy of Monopolistic Pricing

Abstract

Textbooks present the three ‘degrees’ of price discrimination as a sequence of independent pricing methods. These textbook treatments consequently provide inadequate insight as to when a firm might adopt a particular pricing strategy. The paper describes an information-based taxonomy of price discrimination, which can be used to teach monopolistic price discrimination in an integrated way. The pricing strategy adopted by firms is based on the information on consumer demand available to it. The paper proposes a method for ranking profit and efficiency levels under different price discrimination strategies. The information-based taxonomy is compared to the traditional textbook approach.