Recent developments in information technology (IT) have resulted in the collection of a vast amount of customer‐specific data. As IT advances, the quality of such information improves. We analyze a unifying spatial price discrimination model that encompasses the two most studied paradigms of two‐group and perfect discrimination as special cases. Firms use the available information to classify the consumers into different groups. The number of identifiable consumer segments increases with the information quality. Among our findings (1) when the information quality is low, unilateral commitments not to price discriminate arise in equilibrium; (2) after a unique threshold of information precision such a commitment is a dominated strategy, and the game becomes a prisoners' dilemma; and (3) equilibrium profits exhibit a U‐shaped relationship with the information quality.

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The recent rapid growth of the Internet as a medium of communication and commerce, combined with the development of sophisticated software tools, are to a large extent responsible for producing a new kind of information: databases with detailed records about consumers' preferences. These databases have become part of a Þrm's assets, and as such they can be sold to competitors. This possibility has raised numerous concerns from consumer privacy advocates and regulators, who have entered into a heated debate with business groups and industry associations about whether the practice of customer information sharing should be banned, regulated, or left unchecked. This paper investigates the incentives of rival Þrms to share their customer-speciÞc information and evaluates the welfare implications if such exchanges are banned, in the context of a perfect price discrimination model.

We examine the profitability and the welfare implications of price discrimination in twosided markets. Platforms have information about the preferences of the agents that allows them to price discriminate within each group. The conventional wisdom from one-sided horizontally differentiated markets is that price discrimination hurts the firms and benefits consumers, prisoners' dilemma. Moreover, it is well-known that the presence of indirect externalities in two-sided markets can intensify the competition. Despite all these, we show that the possibility of price discrimination, in a two-sided market, may actually soften the competition. Therefore, the implications of price discrimination from one-sided markets may not carry over to two-sided markets. This is the case regardless of whether prices are public or private, although private prices boost profits. Our analysis also sheds light on the welfare properties of price discrimination in intermediate goods markets, such as Business-to-Business (B2B) markets.

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