Essays on Information Economics

Abstract

This dissertation studies problems in information economics. The first chapter investigates monopolistic information selling when the Seller and the Buyer hold different prior beliefs about the state of the world. The main result shows that the Seller’s revenue is maximized by gradually selling information over multiple periods. The second chapter examines optimal communication when multiple Senders share the same information but have access only to a limited language. The main result shows that Senders use their language heterogeneously, and assign non-convex meanings to individual messages while ensuring that the meaning of message profiles remains convex. The final chapter studies strategic communication when a decision-making Receiver must acquire a limited skill set in advance. The main result shows a negative relationship between the informativeness of the Sender’s advice and the Receiver’s skill capacity.