Information acquisition in conflicts

Florian Morath and Johannes Münster ()

Economic Theory, 2013, vol. 54, issue 1, 99-129

Abstract: This paper considers incentives for information acquisition ahead of conflicts. First, we characterize the (unique) equilibrium of the all-pay auction between two players with one-sided asymmetric information where one player has private information about his valuation. Then, we use our results to study information acquisition prior to an all-pay auction. If the decision to acquire information is observable, but not the information received, one-sided asymmetric information can occur endogenously in equilibrium. Moreover, the cut-off values of the cost of information that determine equilibrium information acquisition are higher than those in the first best. Thus, information acquisition is excessive. In contrast, with open or covert information acquisition, the equilibrium cut-off values are as in the first best. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2013

Keywords: All-pay auctions; Conflicts; Contests; Information acquisition; Asymmetric information; D72; D74; D82; D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00199-012-0710-6 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Information acquisition in conflicts (2010)
Working Paper: Information acquisition in conflicts (2009)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:joecth:v:54:y:2013:i:1:p:99-129

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... eory/journal/199/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00199-012-0710-6

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Theory is currently edited by Nichoals Yanneils

More articles in Economic Theory from Springer, Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().