Through more accurate and detailed pricing of personal information, the platform transfers all the welfare originally belonging to consumers into its own hands, resulting in the former from There are fewer benefits from the transaction. This kind of view holds that since the competition regulations of various countries emphasize the protection of consumer welfare, the above behavior of reducing consumer welfare should naturally be curbed. Compared with the first type of argument, the second type of argument is more "platform-oriented", emphasizing the advantages of precise price discrimination in terms of efficiency .
Due to the "winner-takes-all" nature of the Internet age, many emerging industries are dominated by a few oligopolies or simply close to a monopoly. Compared with the efficiency loss caused by monopoly pricing, full price discrimination can instead Fax List maximize the total social welfare. That being the case, it might as well allow platforms to engage in this type of price discrimination. After that, through redistribution tools such as taxation, society can achieve reasonable distribution results. However, the above two types of methods have a common disadvantage: the assumption is that consumers are "frightened". Among them, the platform can freely choose the pricing strategy, and consumers can only react passively.
However, many research results in recent years have allowed us to see a more complicated side of this problem: consumers sometimes play cards not according to "rationality", but according to "emotion"; a careful pricing strategy can increase profits in the short term, In the long run, it will lead to a "lose-lose"; businesses that seem to benefit from discrimination may eventually join forces to demand the passage of an anti-price discrimination bill. The above paradoxes may seem confusing at first glance, but they are actually well-founded.