Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/57521 
Year of Publication: 
2010
Series/Report no.: 
Preprints of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods No. 2010,40
Publisher: 
Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn
Abstract: 
By using general information structures and precision criteria based on the dispersion of conditional expectations, we study how oligopolists' information acquisition decisions may change the effects of information sharing on the consumer surplus. Sharing information about individual cost parameters gives the following trade-off in Cournot oligopoly. On the one hand, it decreases the expected consumer surplus for a given information precision, as the literature shows. On the other hand, information sharing increases the firms' incentives to acquire information, and the consumer surplus increases in the precision of the firms' information. Interestingly, the latter effect may dominate the former effect.
Subjects: 
oligopoly
information acquisition
information sharing
information structures
consumer surplus
JEL: 
D82
L13
L40
D83
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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