Speaker : Dr. Shraman Banerjee
Abstract:
We consider a dynamic price mechanism of a seller who must sell a single unit of a good to a number of buyers before a deadline. The price in each period is sequentially rational. When the buyers are ex-ante symmetric but non-anonymous to the seller, we propose an asymmetric mechanism that includes a horizontal price discrimination along with inter-temporal price discrimination. We show that the asymmetric mechanism generates higher revenue than the optimal symmetric mechanism in Horner and Samuelson (2011), even though the buyers are ex-ante symmetric. We use a priority-based tie-breaking allocation rule in place of the random allocation rule, generally used for symmetric mechanisms, to generate the asymmetric equilibrium.