Brave New Data: Pricing Expertise and Discovery

We study the procurement of verifiable evidence from an expert who privately assesses a binary state and chooses the direction and intensity of evidence acquisition. The buyer balances the ease of inducing discovery against its value for decisions beyond the expert's initial assessment. An optimal contract pays only for disclosed evidence, independently of the initial report. When acquisition is cheap, equal rewards for evidence of either state induce intensive search whose failure is informative. As costs rise, rewarding evidence of only one state becomes optimal despite the symmetry of the environment, reducing expected payments at the expense of decision accuracy.