We study the competitive provision and endogenous acquisition of political information. Our main result identifies a natural equilibrium channel through which a more competitive market decreases the efficiency of policy outcomes. A critical insight we put forward is that competition among information providers leads to informational specialization: firms provide relatively less information on issues that are of common interest and relatively more information on issues on which agents' preferences are heterogeneous. This enables agents to acquire information about different aspects of the policy, specifically, those that are particularly important to them. This leads to an increase in social disagreement, which has negative welfare implications. We establish that, in large enough societies, competition makes every agent worse off by decreasing the utility that she derives from the policy outcome. Furthermore, we show that this decline cannot be compensated by the decrease in prices resulting from competition.

Many e-commerce platforms use buyers’ personal data to intermediate their transactions with sellers. How much value do such intermediaries derive from the data record of each single individual? We characterize this value and find that one of its key components is a novel externality between records, which arises when the intermediary pools some records to withhold the information they contain. Our analysis has several implications about compensating individuals for the use of their data, guiding companies’ investments in data acquisition, and more broadly studying the demand side of data markets. Our methods combine modern information design with classic duality theory and apply to a large class of principal-agent problems.