Information is a valuable resource: Knowledge is power. And yet it occupies a slum dwelling in the town of economics.’ So begins George Stigler’s article early in the 1960s, often considered to be the start of information economics, written one year after his Chicago colleague Ronald Coase published his seminal paper on ‘Social Cost’, often seen as the start of transaction cost and institutional economics. Contemporaneous legal scholarship had a similar blind spot regarding information as an asset; that is, at least until the last three decades of the twentieth century, during which it came to dominate regulation theory in private law. Throughout the preceding decades, competition issues had been the central occupation of economic theory, and practices that would restrict competition the core target of market regulation.