Information acquisition interactions in two-player quadratic games

This paper considers two-player quadratic games to examine the relation between strategic interactions in actions and in information decisions. We analyze the role of external effects and of the relative intensities with which the players’ actions interact with the uncertain payoff-relevant parameter. We show that, under some conditions on the quadratic preferences, information choices become substitutes when actions are sufficiently complementary. When attention is restricted to beauty contest games, our results contrast qualitatively with the case studied by Hellwig and Veldkamp (2009), where the set of players is a continuum.