Selling Information in Competitive Environments

We consider a setting where data buyers compete in a game of incomplete information, about which a data seller owns some payoff relevant information. We formulate the problem facing the seller as a joint information and mechanism design problem: deciding which information to sell, while at the same time eliciting the private value types of the buyers and collecting payments. We derive the welfare- and revenue-optimal mechanisms for a class of binary games. Our results reveal some important features of selling information in competitive environments: (i) the negative externalities arising from competition among buyers increase the profitability of selling exclusive information to one of the buyers; (ii) in order for the buyers to follow the seller’s action recommendations, the extent of exclusive sales must be limited; (iii) these same equilibrium constraints also limit the distortions in the allocation of information distortion that can be introduced by a monopolist data seller; (iv) the fiercer the competition across buyers the stronger the previous two limitations, and the weaker the impact of market power on the equilibrium allocation of information.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2021

Author dc:creator

• Nouripour, Amir

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Dahleh, Munther A.

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright MIT

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/139898

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/139898