Strategic Incentives and the Optimal Sale of Information

Abstract

A monopolist data seller offers information to privately informed data buyers. I characterize the seller’s optimal menu, which screens between two types of buyers. Buyers’ preferences for information allow the seller to extract all surplus, and the optimal menu’s features are determined by the interaction between buyers’ strategic incentives and the correlation of their private information. The seller offers perfect information to the buyer with the highest willingness to pay and partial information, which makes this type indifferent. Both experiments are informative even when buyers have congruent beliefs if they have coordination (anticoordination) incentives and their private information is negatively (positively) correlated. (JEL D21, D42, D82, D83)