Learning before Trading: On the Inefficiency of Ignoring Free Information
研究买方在交易前可购买信号时，免费学习均衡的帕累托排序，发现信息成本趋零时均衡收敛于最差的免费学习均衡。
This paper analyzes a bilateral trade model in which the buyer’s valuation for the object is uncertain and she can privately purchase any signal about her valuation. The seller makes a take-it-or-leave-it offer to the buyer. The cost of a signal is smooth and increasing in informativeness. We characterize the set of equilibria when learning is free and show that they are strongly Pareto ranked. Our main result is that when learning is costly but the cost of information goes to zero, equilibria converge to the worst free-learning equilibrium.