Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

PARETO‐OPTIMALITY OF AUTHENTIC INFORMATION

PARETO‐OPTIMALITY OF AUTHENTIC INFORMATION . DECEMBER PARETO-OPTIMALITY OF AUTHENTIC INFORMATION S. DAVID NG* I. INTRODUCTION A NUMBER OF RECENT PAPERS have examined the social value of information generation under homogeneous beliefs.’ It is shown that in a pure exchange economy, where individuals have homogeneous beliefs and time-additive utility functions, information generation does not lead to an increase in social welfare (either in terms of commodity dominance or of ex-unte Pareto-optimality2), A question that naturally arises is whether publicly available information would produce an ex-ante Pareto-improvement in resource allocation when individuals have heterogeneous beliefs. Stiglitz [121 has examined the value of information under heterogeneous beliefs. Using results from the theory of screening, he concludes that the private returns to the provision of information do not, in general, correspond to the social returns. He suggests that there is likely to be excessive spending on “hierarchical inf~rmation”~ and too little spending on “matching inf~rmation.’’~ Marshall [8] has briefly considered the situation in which individuals’ beliefs are heterogeneous. He concludes that publicly available information may have social value in the sense that traders can agree to purchase information and both can benefit in terms of ex-ante satisfaction. However, both he and Stiglitz have not analyzed when http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Journal of Finance Wiley

PARETO‐OPTIMALITY OF AUTHENTIC INFORMATION

Ng, David S.
The Journal of Finance , Volume 32 (5) – Dec 1, 1977
Download PDF
12 pages

Loading next page...
1
 
/lp/wiley/pareto-optimality-of-authentic-information-jTU0zOTDL9

References (15)

Publisher
Wiley
Copyright
1977 The American Finance Association
ISSN
0022-1082
eISSN
1540-6261
DOI
10.1111/j.1540-6261.1977.tb03365.x
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

. DECEMBER PARETO-OPTIMALITY OF AUTHENTIC INFORMATION S. DAVID NG* I. INTRODUCTION A NUMBER OF RECENT PAPERS have examined the social value of information generation under homogeneous beliefs.’ It is shown that in a pure exchange economy, where individuals have homogeneous beliefs and time-additive utility functions, information generation does not lead to an increase in social welfare (either in terms of commodity dominance or of ex-unte Pareto-optimality2), A question that naturally arises is whether publicly available information would produce an ex-ante Pareto-improvement in resource allocation when individuals have heterogeneous beliefs. Stiglitz [121 has examined the value of information under heterogeneous beliefs. Using results from the theory of screening, he concludes that the private returns to the provision of information do not, in general, correspond to the social returns. He suggests that there is likely to be excessive spending on “hierarchical inf~rmation”~ and too little spending on “matching inf~rmation.’’~ Marshall [8] has briefly considered the situation in which individuals’ beliefs are heterogeneous. He concludes that publicly available information may have social value in the sense that traders can agree to purchase information and both can benefit in terms of ex-ante satisfaction. However, both he and Stiglitz have not analyzed when

Journal

The Journal of Finance – Wiley

Published: Dec 1, 1977

There are no references for this article.