Information Trading In Social Networks

This paper considers information trading in fixed networks of economic agents who can only observe and trade with other agents with whom they are directly connected. The authors study the nature of price competition for information in this environment. The linear network, when the agents are located at the integer points of the real line, is a specific example the author completely characterizes. For the linear network there always exists a stationary equilibrium, where the strategies do not depend on time. The author shows that there is an equilibrium where any agent has a nonzero probability of staying uninformed forever.