THE MARKET VALUE OF INFORMATION - SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

We examine the price and allocation of purchased information and of the underlying asset in eight double-auction asset market experiments. Observed outcomes support fully revealing rational expectations in simple environments in which uninformed traders can easily infer the private information of informed traders but support nonrevealing rational expectations in more complex environments. The private value of information is positive in the more complex (noisy) environments, but competition forces the information price to its Nash equilibrium value, and the net gain by purchasers is approximately zero.