A Tale of Two Monopolies

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chen, Yi-Chun, Gui, Zhengqing
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Chen, Yi-Chun
Gui, Zhengqing
author_facet Chen, Yi-Chun
Gui, Zhengqing
contents We apply marginal analysis à la Bulow and Roberts (1989) to characterize revenue-maximizing selling mechanisms for a multiproduct monopoly. We derive marginal revenue from price perturbations over arbitrary sets of bundles and show that optimal mechanisms admit no revenue-increasing perturbation for bundles with positive demand, nor revenue-decreasing perturbations for zero-demand bundles. For any symmetric two-dimensional type distribution under mild regularity, this analysis fully characterizes the optimal mechanism across independence, substitutability, and complementarity. For general type distributions and allocation spaces, our approach identifies bundles that must carry positive demand and provides conditions under which pure bundling or separate selling is suboptimal.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_06763
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Tale of Two Monopolies
Chen, Yi-Chun
Gui, Zhengqing
Theoretical Economics
We apply marginal analysis à la Bulow and Roberts (1989) to characterize revenue-maximizing selling mechanisms for a multiproduct monopoly. We derive marginal revenue from price perturbations over arbitrary sets of bundles and show that optimal mechanisms admit no revenue-increasing perturbation for bundles with positive demand, nor revenue-decreasing perturbations for zero-demand bundles. For any symmetric two-dimensional type distribution under mild regularity, this analysis fully characterizes the optimal mechanism across independence, substitutability, and complementarity. For general type distributions and allocation spaces, our approach identifies bundles that must carry positive demand and provides conditions under which pure bundling or separate selling is suboptimal.
title A Tale of Two Monopolies
topic Theoretical Economics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06763