Random technical questions and ideas I came up with while writing this post:

– Data: How valuable does the market think is this information? How has its valuation changed in the last decade? How to measure it? An idea may be to take market capitalization of traded informationists subtract the expected stream of revenues and what is left is a noisy measure of the potential of information. Of course, this method only captures traded companies.

– Theory: Where does this value come from? Endogenous preference formation? That is, are informationists able to tilt our preferences towards certain products/behaviors? Can firms buy this information (e.g., advertisement spots) to affect our preferences? Theoretically, in equilibrium this should lead to a zero impact since every firm should be wanting to do that. Maybe that is exactly where the value comes from: Everyone has to use it, because otherwise they would lose their piece of market. Or maybe preferences are tilted towards informationists that are able to collect even more data about their clients and so on. Is there some cool mechanism here? Something like: Diminishing returns of capital => exploitation of workers => revolution.