Sell/Buy Bundling

This note examines bundling where a firm sells content or a service and, in the process, buys the customer’s attention or data. For example, Google bundles search with ads. This kind of sell/buy bundle is prevalent in the digital economy. We develop a framework to address the question: When will the firm require customers to take a sell/buy bundle rather than allow them to buy the content without selling their attention? Under our assumptions, if the average customer’s value of content is larg