The welfare costs of informationally efficient prices

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Koren, Moran; Mueller-Frank, Manuel
• 署名单位: Harvard University; University of Navarra; IESE Business School
• 刊物名称: GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0899-8256
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2021.11.014
• 发表日期: 2022
• 页码: 186-196
• 关键词: Dynamic markets; Dynamic prices; herding; Efficient prices; Allocational efficiency; information aggregation; social learning; welfare; Total surplus; asymptotic learning

摘要

Consider a market with two substitute products and a sequence of consumers. The consumers are uncertain about the quality of each product but obtain some private information about it. Additionally, each consumer observes the purchase decisions of her predecessors but not their private information. Absent prices, the standard logic of herding is that all but finitely many consumers may, with positive probability, select the lower quality product. One perspective in the literature is that informationally efficient market prices can resolve the herding inefficiency and induce asymptotic learning where the beliefs of consumers about product qualities converge to the truth. This paper shows that, while informationally efficient prices induce asymptotic learning, they also inflict a welfare cost. That is, we show that the expected welfare is decreasing in the frequency with which prices are set to be informationally efficient. (C) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.