Signal Structure and Strategic Information Acquisition: Deliberative Auctions with Interdependent Values

The ability to gather information can affect outcomes in auctions and other games of incomplete information. We investigate situations where agents have a choice about which information, or signals, to observe, and are informed about the signal choices of others. Our models cover common-value games where agents decide whether to coordinate on observed information, and games mixing private-and commonvalue components. We find that the dependence structure among available signals can produce qualitatively distinct behaviors in equilibrium, including some cases where strategic agents implicitly collude to acquire less than maximally informative signal combinations.