Economics of information acquisition and disclosure

Abstract

The economic phenomenon investigated in the first essay is the public provision of information through voluntary disclosures in asset markets. Mainly, it studies how seller uncertainty regarding whether her private information constitutes conclusive proof of the value of the asset for potential buyers affects the actions of the market participants and, through that, public information provision. The second essay also concerns the public provision of information through voluntary disclosures. Specifically, it studies how seller incentives to acquire and disclose conclusive evidence depend on her informational advantage over the market. The third essay revisits a classic model of the optimal search for the best alternative in Weitzman (1979). Weitzman considers a situation in which a decision-maker owns a number of boxes, each of which contains an unknown prize. At each time before she stops, the decision-maker chooses either to learn the value of the prize in some box or to stop for the payoff equal to the largest sampled prize. Weitzman assumes that the decision-maker can sample all the boxes on her own. The social phenomenon I study in the third essay is the mismatch between property rights and knowledge: the decision-maker owns the boxes but does not necessarily know how to investigate them and therefore has to hire intermediaries to do it on her behalf.