Rule: treat an information advantage as the counterparty's information disadvantage — that is the source of the edge

Rule. When making the affirmative case for a proprietary information advantage, frame the edge structurally: the advantage is, by definition, the other side's disadvantage. The argument is not "data is good" — it is "what does an uninformed competitor do instead, and why is that worse?"

Why. This is the Akerlof (Akerlof 1970 — "The Market for Lemons"; asymmetric information can collapse markets (Nobel 2001)) and Stigler (Stigler 1961 — "The Economics of Information"; costly search produces price dispersion (JPE 69:213-225)) spine. Every documented information-edge case in the corpus — American Airlines yield management, Tesco Clubcard, Progressive Snapshot, alt-data credit scoring — has the same shape: the informed party prices, allocates, or selects more accurately than peers who cannot observe what it observes.

How to apply. For every "information edge" claim in a Candid article, write the counterparty's decision explicitly. ("Without RM, competitors leave money on the table on inframarginal buyers and lose price-sensitive buyers they could have profitably served.") If you cannot write the counterparty's decision, the edge claim is incomplete — re-examine whether the information actually changes anything.