Privacy-preserving Information Sharing in Oligopoly Competitions
摘要
Information sharing among competing suppliers can improve decision-making under uncertainty, yet strategic concerns regarding rival exploitation often deter voluntary disclosure. We study information-sharing mechanisms in a Cournot oligopoly with uncertain demand, where a platform aggregates suppliers' signals through privacy-preserving channels and may also possess an exogenous external signal. The central challenge is to balance strategic safety with informational utility: privacy noise reduces the exposure of individual signals, but also lowers the value of the shared information pool. We first characterize a baseline setting in which access to aggregated information is contingent on participation. In a two-firm market without an external signal, firms refuse to share regardless of the privacy level. In an \(n\)-firm market, sharing may arise even without privacy safeguards because non-participating firms lose access to the aggregated signal. Building on this baseline, we show that privacy protection alone is insufficient to incentivize disclosure; it must be combined with a sufficiently informative external signal. We further show that firms with more accurate private signals require stronger privacy protection. Overall, our results characterize the sharing-feasible region and highlight the complementarity between privacy design and the external information environment.
正文
Information sharing among competing suppliers can improve decision-making under uncertainty, yet strategic concerns regarding rival exploitation often deter voluntary disclosure. We study information-sharing mechanisms in a Cournot oligopoly with uncertain demand, where a platform aggregates suppliers' signals through privacy-preserving channels and may also possess an exogenous external signal. The central challenge is to balance strategic safety with informational utility: privacy noise reduces the exposure of individual signals, but also lowers the value of the shared information pool. We first characterize a baseline setting in which access to aggregated information is contingent on participation. In a two-firm market without an external signal, firms refuse to share regardless of the privacy level. In an \(n\)-firm market, sharing may arise even without privacy safeguards because non-participating firms lose access to the aggregated signal. Building on this baseline, we show that privacy protection alone is insufficient to incentivize disclosure; it must be combined with a sufficiently informative external signal. We further show that firms with more accurate private signals require stronger privacy protection. Overall, our results characterize the sharing-feasible region and highlight the complementarity between privacy design and the external information environment. Authors: Yuxin Liu, M. Amin Rahimian Categories: econ.TH, cs.CR, cs.CY, cs.GT PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.02348v1
标签
- category:cs.cr
- category:cs.cy
- category:cs.gt
- category:econ.th
- primary_category:econ.th
- source:arxiv
- type:paper
扩展字段
{
"arxiv_id": "2606.02348v1",
"authors": [
"Yuxin Liu",
"M. Amin Rahimian"
],
"categories": [
"econ.TH",
"cs.CR",
"cs.CY",
"cs.GT"
],
"comment": null,
"doi": null,
"entry_id": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02348v1",
"pdf_url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.02348v1",
"primary_category": "econ.TH",
"search_query": "cat:cs.CR",
"updated_at": "2026-06-01T14:58:38+00:00"
}