THE VALUE OF PRIVATE INFORMATION IN MONOPOLY <link rid="fn16">-super-* </link>

We investigate a basic question about a monopoly with incomplete information: when does the seller have an incentive to allow potential buyers to acquire more private information about their tastes for the seller's product? Under plausible conditions such as log-concave density of willingness-to-pay and convex marginal cost, the seller prefers that the paying customers be well informed as a group but be left in the dark regarding their individual tastes. Copyright 2008 The Authors.