Endogenous Private Information Structures

Abstract

We formally incorporate the option to gather information into a game and thus endogenize the information structure. We ask whether models with exogenous information structures are robust with respect to this endogenization. Any Nash equilibrium of the game with information acquisition induces a Nash equilibrium in the corresponding game with an exogenous structure. We provide sufficient conditions on the structure of the game for which this remains true when "Nash" is replaced by "sequential". We characterize the (sequential) Nash equilibria of games with exogenous information structures that can arise as a (sequential) Nash equilibrium of games with endogenous information acquisition.