Privacy-preserving Information Sharing in Oligopoly Competitions
For platform designers and regulators, it characterizes conditions under which competing firms voluntarily share demand information through privacy-preserving channels.
This paper studies privacy-preserving information sharing in Cournot oligopoly, finding that privacy protection alone is insufficient to incentivize disclosure; it must be combined with a sufficiently informative external signal. Firms with more accurate private signals require stronger privacy protection.
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.