Competition under Nonlinear Pricing

Despite its great prevalence in practice, competition through whole schedules of prices as function of quantities remains largely unexplored. To deal with this question, the multiprincipal incentive theory is exploited to build a theoretical model of oligopolistic competition which is fitted to data on the French market of energy distribution. A distinguishing feature of our analysis is that in equilibrium, nonlinear pricing schemes depend on an aggregated statistic of unknown individual valuations for the different goods and on the rivals' contract parameters. The empirical results show that incomplete information plays a crucial role. Since estimates of the structural parameters are obtained, inferences can be drawn on the degree of product differentiation, the effectiveness of regulatory constraint and the levels of suppliers' price margins.