TY - JOUR
T1 - Reselling information
AU - Nageeb Ali, S.
AU - Chen-Zion, Ayal
AU - Lillethun, Erik
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 Elsevier Inc.
PY - 2024/11
Y1 - 2024/11
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.geb.2024.08.015
DO - 10.1016/j.geb.2024.08.015
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85203407126
SN - 0899-8256
VL - 148
SP - 23
EP - 43
JO - Games and Economic Behavior
JF - Games and Economic Behavior
ER -