Information Asymmetry Please note that we do not use the title "information costs" or "imperfect informa- tion" in this section. The reason is that information is involved in market failure in at least two distinct ways. information itself has public characteristics. interfere with of information is nonrivalrous-one person's primarily whether not Consumption another's; the relevant analytical question is consumption clusion not possible. Thus, in the public goods context we are interested in the production of information itself. Second, and the subject of the discussion and information about here, there may be situations where the amount of characteristics of a good varies relevant ways across persons. The buyer and the seller in a market transaction, for example, may have different information about the of the good being traded. Similarly, there may be differences the of of information relating to the attributes of an externality between the generator the and the affected party. Workers, for instance, may not be as well in- formed about the health risks of industrial chemicals as their employers. Notice that context we are not primarily interested in information but in the degree of asymmetry in the information that relevant parties have about any good. We thus between information good (the good case) and information about a good's attributes as distributed between buyer and seller or between externality generator and affected pa (the information asymmetry case