Reselling information

B-Tier
Journal: Games and Economic Behavior
Year: 2024
Volume: 148
Issue: C
Pages: 23-43

Authors (3)

Score contribution per author:

0.673 = (α=2.02 / 3 authors) × 1.0x B-tier

α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count

Abstract

Information can be simultaneously consumed, replicated, and sold to others. We study how resale affects a decentralized market for information. Even if the initial seller is an informational monopolist, she captures non-trivial rents from at most a single buyer in any Markovian equilibrium: in the frequent-offer limit, her payoffs converge to 0 once a single buyer buys information. By contrast, there exists a non-Markovian “prepay equilibrium” where payment is extracted from most buyers before information is sold. This prepay equilibrium exploits buyers' ability to resell information and results in the seller achieving (approximately) the same payoff that she would were resale prohibited.

Technical Details

RePEc Handle
repec:eee:gamebe:v:148:y:2024:i:c:p:23-43
Journal Field
Theory
Author Count
3
Added to Database
2026-01-25