Endogenous Information Acquisition on Opponents' Valuations in Multidimensional First Price Auctions

摘要

This paper investigates bidder's covert behavior of endogenous information acquisitionon her opponents' valuations in first price auction model with independent private values.Such an information acquisition setting leads to bidimensional type space and bidimensionalstrategy space. We consider two different specifications of the environments: the ex anteinformation acquisition setting and the interim information acquisition setting. In equilibriathe expected payoffs of the bidder under these specifications could exceed the counterpartpayoffs of the corresponding standard sealed-bid auctions without information acquisition aslong as the cost is small, but the auctioneer has lower payoffs in these models than thoseof the standard ones. Moreover, the incurred information cost becomes the deadweight loss,resulting in ine±cient outcomes.