Ulric B. and Evelyn L. Bray Social Sciences Seminar

Abstract: A multi-product monopolist faces a buyer who is privately informed about his valuations for the goods. As is well-known, optimal mechanisms are in general complicated, while simple mechanisms—such as pure bundling or separate sales—can be far from optimal and do not admit clear-cut comparisons. We show that this changes if the monopolist observes sufficiently rich data about the buyer's valuations: Now, pure bundling always outperforms separate sales; moreover, there is a sense in which pure bundling performs essentially as well as the optimal mechanism. To formalize this, we characterize how fast the corresponding revenues converge to the first-best revenue as the monopolist's data grows rich: Pure bundling achieves the same convergence rate to the first-best as optimal mechanisms; in contrast, the convergence rate under separate sales is suboptimal.

Joint work with Ryota Iijima and Yuhta Ishii.