Collecting Information to Improve Decision-Making

Abstract

In this paper we consider information collecting (IC) situations where an action taker in an uncertain situation can improve his action choices by gathering information from some players who are more informed about the situation. Then the problem of sharing the gains when cooperating with informants is tackled by constructing an appropriate game, the IC?game corresponding to the IC?situation. It turns out that the cone of IC?games, given a fixed set of players, coincides with the cone of 0?normalized monotonic games with a veto player. Also special classes of convex IC?games and big boss IC?games are considered, for which more is known about the solution concepts.

Keywords: information, cooperative games, solutions, monotonic games, veto player

JEL Classification: C71, D89