Fair Price Discrimination

A seller is pricing identical copies of a good to a stream of unit-demand buyers. Each buyer has a value on the good as his private information. The seller only knows the empirical value distribution of the buyer population and chooses the revenue-optimal price. We consider a widely studied third-degree price discrimination model where an information intermediary with perfect knowledge of the arriving buyer's value sends a signal to the seller, hence changing the seller's posterior and inducing the seller to set a personalized posted price. We aim to find signaling schemes that is fair to the buyers, and we show the surprising existence of a novel signaling scheme that simultaneously 8-approximates all welfare functions that are non-negative, monotonically increasing, symmetric, and concave (e.g. the utilitarian social welfare, the Nash welfare, and the max-min welfare). This is joint work with Sid Banerjee, Kamesh Munagala and Yiheng Shen.