On March 18, 2026, Philipp Strack, the Cowles Foundation Professor of Economics at Yale University and Director of the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, delivered the annual Uwe Reinhardt Distinguished Lecture at Princeton.

Strack presented his paper, “Non-Discriminatory Personalized Pricing.”

“Many companies know a lot about their consumers, right? If you go on Amazon, they know your whole shopping history, and that’s true of many other businesses,” said Strack. “So, in principle, they can personalize the prices they charge. They could charge you a different price than someone else, and we’ve already seen examples of that happening. One issue with this is that, for many domains in the U.S. and in Europe, there’s anti-discrimination legislation. You cannot offer different prices across different protected groups. If a business personalizes prices and chooses a price that would give them as much profit as possible, they would typically violate these laws.” Strack continues, “This paper looks at how much profit firms that comply with these laws are making, who is benefiting from these laws, and different variants of these laws. Anti-discrimination legislation covers between 30-60% of consumer transaction volume within the U.S.”

Regulating firms’ pricing decisions involves trade-offs, especially when moral issues are at stake. Understanding how firms will react to this legislation can help advise future legislation and, therefore, its economic impact. “Once we understand how they might react, we can think about whether that is the intended consequence, and whether we might want different legislation because we want the firms to do something different.”

Recent cases of personalized pricing, often driven by profit motives and resulting in discriminatory pricing, caught Strack’s attention. “It wasn’t clear to me what the trade-offs are (of the regulatory legislation). That is what led to this research paper,” Strack shared. “We are only going to see more personalization of prices, and it might actually be these laws that keep companies from doing so because of the legal risks.”

About Philipp Strack

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. Strack 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 as a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research Boston. At Yale, Strack teaches mathematical game theory at the Ph.D. level.

His research focuses on economic theory and modeling. Speaking about his upcoming research, Strack shared that he and his co-author, Kai-Hao Yang, would continue working on price discrimination. “We will be building on this paper. I think there are many interesting questions around regulation to research…One question we only barely touched on in this paper is thinking about optimal regulation more seriously.”

In 2019, Strack received the Sloan Fellowship in Economics. The American Economic Association awarded Strack the Clark Medal in 2024, stating, “Philipp Strack is a deeply creative and prolific microeconomic theorist whose research has enriched our understanding of economics on several fronts.” Learn more about Strack and his research by visiting his website.

The Uwe Reinhardt Distinguished Lecture

The Uwe Reinhardt Distinguished Lectureship was created through a gift from Gilchrist B. Berg (’73) in honor of Uwe E. Reinhardt, Princeton’s James Madison Professor of Political Economy, professor of economics and public affairs.

Reinhardt, who was a member of Princeton’s faculty for nearly 50 years, was one of the nation’s leading economists, with particular expertise in the American health care system. His advice was frequently sought by policymakers, journalists, and health-related organizations here and abroad, as well as by Congress. He was also known as a charismatic and generous teacher with an incisive wit and a warm, irreverent personality, which endeared him to generations of students and colleagues.

You can learn more here about the Uwe Reinhardt Distinguished Lecture series and the Uwe Reinhardt Professorship in Economics.