The Price of a Familiar Perspective

Access to past reports changes how consumers learn about competing information providers. A subscriber who has learned to interpret a familiar source may find an equally competent rival less useful. We study how opening the rival's archive changes renewal prices and the effect of outcome feedback. Better feedback strengthens the familiar source's advantage when rival reports are inaccessible, but can weaken it once some rival records are available. We derive the exact threshold in a Gaussian learning model with differentiated price competition. Opening further records narrows the renewal premium and raises consumer surplus. When the familiar source initially serves a sufficiently large share, however, partial opening can reduce aggregate forecasting quality and total surplus by drawing consumers toward a rival that remains less informative. Complete access improves both outcomes relative to every incomplete archive. These results concern a covered interior renewal market with inherited customer histories, before implementation costs. The results distinguish the quality of feedback from access to the records with which consumers combine it.