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Selling Experiments: Menu Pricing of Information

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Abstract

A monopolist sells informative experiments to heterogeneous buyers. Buyers differ in their prior information, and hence in their willingness to pay for additional signals. The monopolist can profitably offer a menu of experiments. We show that, even under costless information acquisition and free degrading of information, the optimal menu is quite coarse. The seller offers at most two experiments, and we derive conditions under which at vs. discriminatory pricing is optimal.

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  • Dirk Bergemann & Alessandro Bonatti & Alex Smolin, 2014. "Selling Experiments: Menu Pricing of Information," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 1952, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.
    • Handle: RePEc:cwl:cwldpp:1952
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    Cited by:

    1. Dirk Bergemann & Stephen Morris, 2016. "Information Design, Bayesian Persuasion, and Bayes Correlated Equilibrium," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 106(5), pages 586-591, May.
    2. Bertin Martens, 2018. "The impact of data access regimes on artificial intelligence and machine learning," JRC Working Papers on Digital Economy 2018-09, Joint Research Centre.

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    Keywords

    Experiments; Mechanism design; Price discrimination; Product differentiation; Selling information;
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