Selten Lecture 2026 with Prof. Dr. Philipp Strack (📍 Important Venue Update)

With the Selten Lecture, ECONtribute and the Reinhard Selten Institute invite internationally renowned researchers once a year to present their latest research to the academic community. In this year’s Selten Lecture, Prof. Dr. Philipp Strack (Yale University) will talk about „Non-Discriminatory Personalized Pricing“.

Abstract:

A monopolist offers personalized prices to consumers with unit demand, heterogeneous values, and idiosyncratic costs, who differ in a protected characteristic, such as race or gender. The seller is subject to a non-discrimination constraint: consumers with the same cost, but different characteristics must face identical prices. Such constraints arise in regulated markets like credit or insurance. The setting reduces to an optimal transport, and we characterize the optimal pricing rule. Under this rule, consumers may retain surplus, and either group may benefit. Strengthening the constraint to cover transaction prices redistributes surplus, harming the low-value group and benefiting the high-value group.

About the Speaker:

Prof. Dr. Philipp Strack is the Director of the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics at Yale University. He is the Cowles Foundation Professor of Economics, and has a secondary appointment as Professor of Computer Science. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Bonn, Germany, in 2013. He joined Yale in 2019 as an associate professor, having previously served as a faculty member at the University of California Berkeley and a postdoc at Microsoft Research Boston.

Date: July 17, 2026
Admission: 16:00 – 16:30
Start: 16:30 – 17:35
Location: Schumpeter-Raum, Universitätsclub Bonn
Konviktstraße 9, 53113 Bonn