> Well, these huge chains have bean counters that do exactly these kind of calculations, and in general, no.

That's why I mentioned selling the same information to 5 companies. I get each of them separately maybe paying a few bucks. I'm assuming that a few of them resell the information to the same market making that information less useful and giving me more value.

But at $70+ a month for the very repetitive shopping lists from a single location? My guess is they don't plan for people actually using the offers efficiently. If they did, the rewards would plummet.

By selling to multiple companies is likely to devalue your information. That has been factored in to the discount pricing (in aggregate, over the entire population of people that use these discounts), because that's the point of the people who calculate this.

Sure, but it doesn't matter if you sell to 1, 2, or 5 companies: they've all priced this in to their individual models, which means you can't really get any better with any individual company by, say, giving them an exclusive license to this particular data. But, in aggregate, you can do better selling to more companies than any individual model prices in. Which means the Nash equilibrium here is, unfortunately, a race to the bottom, but, it remains to be seen if we've reached that or not.

Hmmm.

You as an individual don't matter. On average people will sell to a certain amount of companies, that's what will be factored in. Perhaps you can get a slightly better deal selling to twice as many companies, though of course this gives you extra hassle as well (which has a cost). The benefits you will receive are in any case marginal, of necessity. I do not deny they can be bigger than the company's benefits in individual cases.

> Well, these huge chains have bean counters that do exactly these kind of calculations, and in general, no. They are making more money in aggregate

In aggregate, that might be true, but that doesn't mean it is true for you. It is like coupons. In aggregate they make more money for the company, but individually the super couponers are making more money. There are a lot of systems that understand that a small percent of users will care enough to learn how to actually maximize return, but the other 95% or users make up for it. Credit card points is another good example. All the people that carry a balance and pay interest subsidize the few people that pay theirs off every single month and use the points for "free".