Reselling Information

04/03/2020

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by   S. Nageeb Ali, et al.

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Information is replicable in that it can be simultaneously consumed and sold to others. We study how resale affects a decentralized market for information. We show that even if the initial seller is an informational monopolist, she captures non-trivial rents from at most a single buyer: her payoffs converge to 0 as soon as a single buyer has bought information. By contrast, if the seller can also sell valueless tokens, there exists a “prepay equilibrium” where payment is extracted from all buyers before the information good is released. By exploiting resale possibilities, this prepay equilibrium gives the seller as high a payoff as she would achieve if resale were prohibited.