The Selten Lecture, organized by ECONtribute and the Reinhard Selten Institute, brings leading international researchers to present their latest work each year. In this year’s lecture, Prof. Dr. Philipp Strack (Yale University) will discuss “Non-Discriminatory Personalized Pricing.”

His research examines how a monopolist can offer personalized prices to consumers who differ in their willingness to pay, costs, and protected characteristics such as race or gender. The seller must comply with a non-discrimination rule requiring consumers with the same costs to face identical prices, regardless of protected characteristics. Such regulations are common in markets such as credit and insurance. By modeling the problem as an optimal transport framework, the study identifies the optimal pricing rule and analyzes its effects on consumer surplus and welfare. It further shows how stricter non-discrimination constraints on transaction prices can redistribute surplus between consumer groups.