Meta-prices for Price Information

This paper explores a game where sellers of products sell the information concerning what price is charged for their products to an agent trying to find the minimum price in the market. Each seller draws a product price from a different distribution, known to the agent. Sellers know both their competitors’ distributions and the actual competitors’ price. In equilibrium the lowest product price seller prices price information according to the second lowest product price and other sellers are trying to imitate. We define the strategy space of the game and for the two seller game we introduce the concept of a meta-price: the measure of attractiveness of a product price. We show that in one version of the one-shot game, Nash equilibrium dictates that the seller that happens to be more expensive cannot sell price information. In the infinitely repeated game, we show how our meta-price concept can be used to evaluate seller strategies and calculate expected revenues.