Selling information in competitive environments

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Bonatti, Alessandro; Dahleh, Munther; Horel, Thibaut; Nouripour, Amir
• 署名单位: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC THEORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0531
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2023.105779
• 发表日期: 2024
• 关键词: data; COMPETITION; screening; information design; externalities

摘要

Data buyers compete in a game of incomplete information about which a single data seller owns some payoff-relevant information. The seller faces a joint information-and mechanism-design problem: deciding which information to sell, while eliciting the buyers' types and imposing payments. We derive the welfare-and revenue-optimal mechanisms for a class of games with binary actions and states. Our results highlight the critical properties of selling information in competitive environments: (i) the negative externalities arising from buyer competition increase the profitability of recommending the correct action to one buyer exclusively; (ii) for the buyers to follow the seller's recommendations, the degree of exclusivity must be limited; (iii) the buyers' obedience constraints also reduce the distortions in the allocation of information introduced by a monopolist; (iv) as competition becomes fiercer, these limitations become more severe, weakening the impact of market power on the optimal allocation of information.