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Public versus Private Information Provision
Author(s) -
Clements Matthew T.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
economic papers: a journal of applied economics and policy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.245
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1759-3441
pISSN - 0812-0439
DOI - 10.1111/1759-3441.12087
Subject(s) - government (linguistics) , key (lock) , imperfect , private information retrieval , public information , simple (philosophy) , perfect information , business , computer science , risk analysis (engineering) , knowledge management , economics , microeconomics , computer security , internet privacy , philosophy , linguistics , epistemology
When is it better for the government to provide information, and when is this role better left to the market? I present a simple framework for evaluating this question, where the key factors are the cost of errors based on imperfect information and whether information is eventually revealed to consumers. I then apply the framework to examples.