We consider the model of the data broker selling information to a single agent to maximize his revenue. The agent has private valuation for the additional information, and upon receiving the signal from the data broker, the agent can conduct her own experiment to refine her posterior belief on the states with additional costs. In this paper, we show that in the optimal mechanism, the agent has no incentive to acquire any additional costly information under equilibrium. Still, the ability to acquire additional information distorts the incentives of the agent, and reduces the optimal revenue of the data broker. Moreover, we characterize the optimal mechanism when the valuation function of the agent is separable. The optimal mechanism in general may be complex and contain a continuum of menu entries. However, we show that posting a deterministic price for revealing the states is optimal when the prior distribution is sufficiently informative or the cost of acquiring additional information is sufficiently high, and obtains at least half of the optimal revenue for arbitrary prior and cost functions.
翻译：我们考虑的是向单一代理商出售信息以尽量扩大收入的数据中介模式。该代理商对额外信息有私人估价,一旦收到数据中介商的信号,该代理商就可以进行自己的实验,以改进其对各州的后世信仰,并增加费用。在本文中,我们表明,在最佳机制中,该代理商没有动力在平衡的情况下获取任何额外的昂贵信息。然而,获取额外信息的能力扭曲了该代理商的激励力,减少了数据中介商的最佳收入。此外,我们把最佳机制定性为在该代理商的估值功能可以相互分离时的最佳机制。一般而言,该最佳机制可能很复杂,包含一系列菜单条目。然而,我们表明,在事先分配信息足够丰富或获取额外信息的成本足够高的情况下,为披露国家发布确定性价格是最佳的,并且为任意的先前和成本功能获取至少一半的最佳收入。
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