Information Acquisition in Investment Decisions
研究经理在投资前需付费获取信息时的资本预算模型，分析信息成本高低对投资不足、信息租金及契约设计的影响，为理解企业投资决策提供参考。
This paper studies a capital budgeting model in which a manager is not a priori informed about the investment return but has to incur a cost to learn it. If the cost of information is high, inducing information acquisition reduces underinvestment and increases informational rents relative to when the manager is a priori informed about the investment return. If the cost of information is low, deterring information acquisition is costly because it is necessary to prevent the manager from clandestinely gathering information to substitute his effort with the investment return and deliver only the minimum cash flow required by the contract. In projects more dependent on the return to effort, there is a cost of information cut-off below (above) which the principal prefers to offer a contract that induces (deters) information acquisition. In projects more dependent on the investment return, such a cut-off does not exist when the probability of having an investment with a negative NPV is small.