Redesigning Information Markets in the Era of Language Models

摘要

Information markets face many challenges leading to instability, inefficiency, and failure, ultimately reducing incentives for the creation and distribution of high-quality information. A long-standing issue for information markets is the Buyer's Inspection Paradox: buyers need to inspect information to assess its value, while sellers must limit inspection to prevent unauthorized use or theft. This paradox results from the information asymmetry present in the market, where sellers know more about the quality of their goods than buyers. This work proposes an information market design that leverages language models to mitigate the Buyer's Inspection Paradox by enabling inspection, comparison, and purchase of information, while algorithmically preventing expropriation. Our experiments (a) show methods that improve the economic rationality of language models, (b) investigate how language model behaviour changes with the price of goods, and (c) evaluate the simulated cost-efficiency of the proposed market under various conditions.