Knowing What Others Know: Coordination Motives in Information Acquisition

Christian Hellwig and Laura Veldkamp

ABSTRACT:
We explore how optimal information choices change the predictions of strategic models. When a large number of agents play a game with strategic complementarity, information choices exhibit complementarity as well: If an agent wants to do what others do, they want to know what others know. This makes heterogeneous beliefs difficult to sustain and may generate multiple equilibria. In models with substitutability, agents prefer to differentiate their information choices. We use these theoretical results to examine the role of information choice in recent price-setting models and to propose modeling techniques that ensure equilibrium uniqueness.