The business model of companies such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, relies on monetizing the information on the interactions and influences of their users. How valuable is such information, and is its use beneficial or detrimental for consumer welfare? We study these questions in a model where a monopoly sells a network good and may price discriminate using network information: information ...

One of the most useful sensitivity analysis techniques of decision analysis is the computation of value of information (or clairvoyance), the difference in value obtained by changing the decisions by which some of the uncertainties are observed. In this paper, some simple but powerful extensions to previous algorithms are introduced which allow an efficient value of information calculation on t...

We describe a decision-theoretic approach to information gathering from a distributed network of information sources. Our approach uses an explicit representation of the user’s decision model in order to plan and execute information gathering actions. The information gathering planner issues requests based on the value of information taking into account the computational resources and monetary ...

Digital information changes the ways in which people and organisations interact. This paper examines the nature of this change in the context of the author’s Model for Information (MfI). It investigates the relationship between outcomes and value, selection processes and some attributes of information and explores how this relationship changes in the move from analogue to digital information. S...