Optimal and Myopic Information Acquisition

A decision-maker (DM) faces an intertemporal decision problem, where his payoff depends on actions taken across time as well as on an unknown Gaussian state. The DM can learn about the state from different correlated) information sources, and allocates a budget of samples across these sources each period. A simple information
acquisition strategy for the DM is to neglect dynamic considerations and allocate samples myopically. How inefficient is this strategy relative to the optimal information acquisition strategy? We show that if the budget of samples is sufficiently large then there is no inefficiency: myopic information acquisition is exactly optimal.

Download Paper

Paper Number
17-023
Year
2017