The Wisdom of the Crowd When Acquiring Information Is Costly
研究众筹平台中投资者因避免信息获取成本而依赖前人信息，可能导致信息级联现象，并提出基于时变透明度的最优政策来平衡信息获取激励与投资决策。
We consider a sequential investment process that is characteristic of crowdfunding platforms, among other contexts. Investors wish to avoid the cost of information acquisition and thus prefer to rely on information acquired by previous investors. This may lead to a phenomenon similar to an information cascade. We characterize the optimal policy that balances between the incentive to acquire information and the optimal investment decision. The policy is based on time-varying transparency levels such that it may be worthwhile to conceal some information in some periods. This paper was accepted by Joshua Gans, business strategy.