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KDI 경제교육·정보센터

ENG
  • 경제배움
  • Economic

    Information

    and Education

    Center

한국관련자료
Cost over Content: Information Choice in Trade
CEPR
2025.02.06
How much would buyers pay to have some control over what a seller knows about them? When deciding what information to provide to her counterpart, a privately-informed trader chooses between options that may differ both in their contents and in their costs. For a large class of static and dynamic trading environments where buyers choose from arbitrary sets of signal processes that reveal or obfuscate information to a seller, we establish a “cost-over-content” theorem. In equilibrium, buyers only choose cheapest processes, regardless of the information content they provide. Pooling on any cheapest process is an equilibrium. Our paper uncovers a general source of market failure linked to the direct cost of information choice with consequences for the role of information defaults. We explore applications to bargaining, signaling, disclosure, consumer privacy, and data trade.