Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Economics
The Design And Price Of Information, Dirk Bergemann, Alessandro Bonatti, Alex Smolin
The Design And Price Of Information, Dirk Bergemann, Alessandro Bonatti, Alex Smolin
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
This paper analyzes the trade of information between a data buyer and a data seller. The data buyer faces a decision problem under uncertainty and seeks to augment his initial private information with supplemental data. The data seller is uncertain about the willingness-to-pay of the data buyer due to this private information. The data seller optimally offers a menu of (Blackwell) experiments as statistical tests to the data buyer. The seller exploits differences in the beliefs of the buyer’s types to reduce information rents while limiting the surplus that must be sacrificed to provide incentives.
The Design And Price Of Information, Dirk Bergemann, Alessandro Bonatti, Alex Smolin
The Design And Price Of Information, Dirk Bergemann, Alessandro Bonatti, Alex Smolin
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
A data buyer faces a decision problem under uncertainty. He can augment his initial private information with supplemental data from a data seller. His willingness to pay for supplemental data is determined by the quality of his initial private information. The data seller optimally offers a menu of statistical experiments. We establish the properties that any revenue-maximizing menu of experiments must satisfy. Every experiment is a non-dispersed stochastic matrix, and every menu contains a fully informative experiment. In the cases of binary states and actions, or binary types, we provide an explicit construction of the optimal menu of experiments.