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We consider a monopolistic supplier’s optimal choice of wholesale tariffs when downstream firms are privately informed about their retail costs. Under discriminatorypricing, downstream firms that differ in their ex ante distribution of retail costs are offered different tariffs. Under uniform pricing, the same wholesale tariff is offered to all downstream firms. In contrast to the extant literature on thirddegree price discrimination with nonlinear wholesale tariffs, we find that banning discriminatory wholesale contracts—the usual legal practice in the EU and US— often is beneficial for social welfare. This result is shown to be robust even when the upstream supplier faces competition in the form of fringe supply.

We analyze third degree price discrimination by an upstream monopolist to a continuum of heterogeneous downstream firms. The novelty of our approach is to recognize that customizing prices may be costly. As a consequence, partial price discrimination arises in equilibrium; in particular, we show that inefficient downstream firms receive personalized prices whereas efficient firms are charged a uniform price. The extreme cases of complete price discrimination and uniform price arise in our setting as particular cases, depending on the cost of customizing prices. Financial support from SEJ 2004-02172, SEJ 2007-67895, SEJ 2007-62656, FEDER funds and the IVIE is gratefully acknowledged.

The extant theory on price discrimination in input markets takes the structure of the intermediate industry as exogenously given. This paper endogenizes the structure of the intermediate industry and examines the effects of banning third-degree price discrimination on market structure and welfare. We identify situations where banning price discrimination leads to either higher or lower prices for all downstream firms. These findings are driven by the fact that upstream profits are discontinuous due to entry being costly. Moreover, permitting price discrimination fosters entry which in many cases improves welfare. Nevertheless, entry can also reduce welfare because it may lead to a severe inefficiency in production.