Information Design and Sensitivity to Market Fundamentals

Vaissman Guinsburg, Pedro (2020): Information Design and Sensitivity to Market Fundamentals.

Abstract

I study the problem of firms that disclose verifiable information to each other publicly, in the form of Blackwell Experiments, before engaging in strategic decisions. The signals designed can be either interpreted as statistical reports or as slices of physical quantities, i.e. market segments. Before the state of the world is realized, firms choose a signal policy, an estimation technique, about a private individual payoff state and then are forced to publicize the results of the investigations to all other firms before engaging in price or quantity competition. Because signals are made public, when a firm tries to assess the firm's individual payoff, it also ends up revealing the same information to her opponents. Full Disclosure enables companies to adapt to local market fundamentals at the expense of releasing crucial information to the competitors. On the other hand, Partial Revelation makes companies loose optimality of the decisions with regards to the true state of the world but enable them to commit to an aggressive policy of preclusion that increases the frequency of a favorable distribution of players actions. Whereas Partial Revelation acts as a commitment device and preclude entry in otherwise competitive markets, inducing insensitivity of the decisions with respect to local fundamentals, decentralized decision making is a dominant strategy when the profile of competitors is constant across markets or when a company cannot influence the extensive margin entry decision of the competitor with more or less disclosure of information. Since decentralization acts as a way to correlate decisions with local market fundamentals, and running one single policy in multiple states of the world acts as a commitment device to avoid competitors, I describe a trade off between commitment over a distribution of actions versus correlation with states of the world.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Information Design, Oligopoly and Market Power
• Subjects: D - Microeconomics > D4 - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design > D43 - Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection; D - Microeconomics > D8 - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty > D89 - Other

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