Making money from what you know - how to sell information?

Shani Alkoby, Zihe Wang, David Sarne, Pingzhong Tang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Information plays a key role in many decision situations. The rapid advancement in communication technologies makes information providers more accessible, and various information providing platforms can be found nowadays, most of which are strategic in the sense that their goal is to maximize the providers' expected profit. In this paper, we consider the common problem of a strategic information provider offering prospective buyers information which can disambiguate uncertainties the buyers have, which can be valuable for their decision making. Unlike prior work, we do not limit the information provider's strategy to price setting but rather enable her flexibility over the way information is sold, specifically enabling querying about specific outcomes and the elimination of a subset of non-true world states alongside the traditional approach of disclosing the true world state. We prove that for the case where the buyer is self-interested (and the information provider does not know the true world state beforehand) all three methods (i.e., disclosing the true world-state value, offering to check a specific value, and eliminating a random value) are equivalent, yielding the same expected profit to the information provider. For the case where buyers are human subjects, using an extensive set of experiments we show that the methods result in substantially different outcomes. Furthermore, using standard machine learning techniques the information provider can rather accurately predict the performance of the different methods for new problem settings, hence substantially increase profit.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2019, 31st Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, IAAI 2019 and the 9th AAAI Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence, EAAI 2019
PublisherAAAI press
Pages2421-2428
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781577358091
StatePublished - 2019
Event33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2019, 31st Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, IAAI 2019 and the 9th AAAI Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence, EAAI 2019 - Honolulu, United States
Duration: 27 Jan 20191 Feb 2019

Publication series

Name33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2019, 31st Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, IAAI 2019 and the 9th AAAI Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence, EAAI 2019

Conference

Conference33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2019, 31st Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, IAAI 2019 and the 9th AAAI Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence, EAAI 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityHonolulu
Period27/01/191/02/19

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.

Funding

This research was partially supported by the ISRAEL SCIENCE FOUNDATION (grant No. 1162/17), the ISF-NSFC joint research program (grant No. 2240/15), the Shanghai Sailing Program (Grant No. 18YF1407900) and the National NSFC Grant 61561146398.

FundersFunder number
ISF-NSFC2240/15
Shanghai Sailing Program18YF1407900
National Natural Science Foundation of China61561146398
Israel Science Foundation1162/17

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