Does personalization create or destroy value?
Textbook first-degree price discrimination is efficient: everyone with valuation above cost is served. Real algorithms have noisy information, and real consumers refuse, delay and hide. Both push against the textbook.
Where does every regime × policy sit on the consumer–producer plane?
Steady-state consumer surplus vs producer surplus for all 90 main-experiment cells. The dashed line is the first-best frontier (CS + PS = first best).
Where does the deadweight loss come from?
Efficiency (total welfare ÷ first best) and share of consumers served, by regime.
How much do the conclusions depend on consumer behaviour?
Total welfare change (individualized boosting minus uniform) under six behavioural mixes; 95% intervals.
…and the consumer-surplus change
Same mixes, consumer surplus.
Does competition rescue consumers?
Average price faced and consumer surplus by number of sellers; solid = high switching (0.5), dotted = low (0.1).
Robustness: individualized boosting vs uniform, % change
One-at-a-time deviations from the baseline (10 seeds each). Rows are axes, columns are outcomes.