Information Acquisition and Strategic Disclosure in Cournot Oligopoly
Preprint
- 1 October 2004
- preprint
- Published by Elsevier in SSRN Electronic Journal
Abstract
We study the incentives of Cournot oligopolists to acquire and disclose information on a common cost (or demand) parameter. Since information acquisition is such that firms may fail to acquire information, firms can credibly conceal unfavorable news while disclosing favorable news. This paper compares the incentives, profits and welfare under such a partial disclosure regime with the regimes where firms commit to share all or no information. We show that, for sufficiently low (high) information acquisition costs, a firm (antitrust authority) prefers strategic disclosure to precommitment. Moreover, incentives and expected profits are often non-monotonic in the amount of information disclosed.Keywords
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