How to Sell Hard Information

S Nageeb Ali, Nima Haghpanah, Xiao Lin and Ron Siegel

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2022, vol. 137, issue 1, 619-678

Abstract: The seller of an asset has the option to buy hard information about the value of the asset from an intermediary. The seller can then disclose this information before selling the asset in a competitive market. We study how the intermediary designs and sells hard information to robustly maximize the intermediary's revenue across all equilibria. Even though the intermediary could use an accurate test that reveals the asset’s value, we show that robust revenue maximization leads to a noisy test with a continuum of possible scores. In addition, the intermediary always charges the seller for disclosing the test score to the market, but not necessarily for running the test. This enables the intermediary to robustly appropriate a significant share of the surplus resulting from the asset sale.

Date: 2022
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