Working Paper Series Ad-valorem Platform Fees and Efficient Price Discrimination Wp 12-08 Zhu Wang Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond Ad-valorem Platform Fees and Efficient Price Discrimination *
نویسنده
چکیده
This paper investigates a puzzle and possible policy concern: Why do platforms such as eBay and Visa that enable the trade of goods of different unobserved costs and valuations rely predominantly on linear ad-valorem fees, that is, fees that increase in proportion to the sale price of the trades that they enable? Under a broad class of demand functions, we show that a linear ad-valorem fee schedule enables a platform to maximize its profit as if it could actually observe the costs and valuations of the goods traded and set a different optimal fee for each good. Surprisingly, we find for this class of demands, allowing the platform to set ad-valorem fees (i.e. price discriminate) increases social welfare, both when the platform is regulated to recover costs and when the platform is unregulated. JEL classification: D4, L1, L5
منابع مشابه
Ad-valorem platform fees and efficient price discrimination∗
Online shopping platforms (such as Amazon and eBay) or payment card networks (such as Visa and MasterCard) serve to facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers. While these platforms typically only incur small per-transaction costs, they often charge sellers a substantial proportional fee plus a small fixed transaction fee. In this paper, we investigate the implications of this use of ad...
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