American Economic Review
ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)
The Design and Price of Information
American Economic Review
vol. 108,
no. 1, January 2018
(pp. 1–48)
Abstract
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.Citation
Bergemann, Dirk, Alessandro Bonatti, and Alex Smolin. 2018. "The Design and Price of Information." American Economic Review, 108 (1): 1–48. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20161079Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- D42 Market Structure, Pricing, and Design: Monopoly
- D81 Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
- D82 Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
- D83 Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness