Selling Information Dynamically
Abstract
A seller sequentially supplies information to a decision-maker under uncertainty. In each period, the seller posts a price for the current signal, and the buyer either stops and acts or buys the signal. After each sale, the signal realization is observed by both parties. I characterize equilibrium under a common prior. With commitment to future prices, the seller extracts the full social surplus using a two-part tariff with per-period prices set at marginal cost, inducing efficient stopping and terminal decision rules, and an access fee. Without commitment, full extraction persists with history-dependent pricing, which may involve prices below marginal cost.
with Pol Antràs
AEA Papers and Proceedings 115 (2025): 624–30
Building on Böhm-Bawerk (1889), we propose a measure of the average period of production defined as a weighted average temporal distance between the time at which a firm employs its inputs and the time at which these inputs deliver finished goods to consumers. Under stationarity conditions, this measure corresponds to the ratio of a firm’s total inventories to the cost of the goods it sells in a given period. Using data from publicly traded companies, we compute this measure for various industries and countries and show that, consistent with theory, it is lower the higher is the cost of capital.
with Philipp Kartaev
Voprosy Ekonomiki, no. 6 (2021): 32–46 [in Russian]
Abstract
The work is devoted to the study of the influence of changes in the transparency of monetary policy on the effect of exchange rate pass-through in consumer prices. Based on econometric modeling of cross-country panel data, it is shown that an increase in the transparency of communication between the central bank and the population leads to a decrease in the elasticity of domestic prices with respect to the exchange rate in countries that target inflation and adhere to other monetary policy regimes. The effect is observed for both developed and developing economies; it is stronger in the second case. The obtained result can be interpreted as an argument in favor of the advisability of the Bank of Russia transition from a verbal description of its future actions to the publication of a quantitative forecast of the interest rate trajectory.
