Opinions Before Evidence: Dynamic Information Quality and Source Familiarity

Abstract

New information services begin without a record that teaches customers how to interpret them. We study a two-period monopoly selling standardized forecasts whose committed scoring technology combines noisy evidence with a persistent, initially unknown calibration. More evidence improves a forecast's current decision value but makes the source's calibration harder to learn. The first forecast is released publicly only after its immediate use expires, so it builds a common decoder for the next forecast. For an arbitrary stakes distribution, monopoly pricing uses the same static cutoff in both periods. Provider patience lowers initial evidence intensity; with identical technologies and a binary format menu, transparent conditions generate an endogenous low-evidence first forecast followed by a high-evidence second forecast. A constrained planner switches later because monopoly undercaptures the return to costly evidence. A calibration audit eliminates the accuracy--interpretability trade-off, but the provider may not adopt it even when adoption is socially valuable. The mechanism requires neither distorted reporting nor confirmation preferences: the strategic choice is the auditable evidence input to a mechanically generated score.