Monopoly Pricing, Optimal Randomization, and Resale

Information design through scarcity and social learning

“…Work on scarcity strategies has mainly focused on discouraging consumer strategic delay (DeGraba (1995), Nocke and Peitz (2007), Möller and Watanabe (2010)). Creating scarcity for lowvaluation consumers can also help a monopolist to price discriminate, and may be optimal if revenues are non-concave (Wilson (1988), Bulow andRoberts (1989), Ferguson (1994), Loertscher and Muir (2022)). Both Debo et al (2012) and Stock and Balachander (2005) consider scarcity and social learning but in a setting with a privately informed seller, where scarcity does not help hide information from consumers, but instead may help reveal it.…”