Communication Enhancement through Information Acquisition by Uninformed Player

Abstract

We analyze a situation in which an uninformed decision maker can gather information about states by paying a cost before communicating with an informed sender. We focus on multidimensional information gathering: the decision maker can determine how much time to allocate to gather information about each state. It is shown that communication can be enhanced under multidimensional information gathering compared with no information gathering. We also characterize the optimal investigation, which specifies the state the decision maker gathers information about. Our result demonstrates an advantage of multidimensional information gathering over single-dimensional information gathering.