Template-Type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0
Title: Strategic Incentives and the Optimal Sale of Information
Author-Name: Rosina Rodríguez Olivera
Author-Email: rrodrigu@uni-bonn.de
Classification-JEL: D80, D82
Keywords: Screening, Information, Strategic incentives

Abstract: I consider a model in which a monopolist data-seller offers information to privately informed data-buyers who
play a game of incomplete information. I characterize the data-seller's optimal menu, which screens between two types of
data-buyers. Data-buyers' preferences for information cannot generally be ordered across types. I show that the nature of
data-buyers' preferences for information allows the data-seller to extract all surplus. In particular, the data-seller offers
a perfectly informative experiment , which makes the data-buyer with the highest willingness to pay and a partially informative
experiment, which makes the data-buyer with the highest willingness to pay for perfect information indifferent between both
experiments. I also show that the features of the optimal menu are determined by the interaction between data-buyers'
strategic incentives and the correlation of their private information. Namely, the data-seller offers two informative
experiments even when data-buyers would choose the same action without supplemental information if data-buyers: i) have
coordination incentives and their private information is negatively correlated or ii) have anti-coordination incentives
and their private information is positively correlated.


Note: 
Length: 61
Creation-Date: 2023-07
Revision-Date:
File-URL: https://www.crctr224.de/research/discussion-papers/archive/dp442
File-Format: application/pdf
Handle: RePEc:bon:boncrc:CRCTR224_2023_442