The Wisdom of the Crowd When Acquiring Information Is Costly

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.