Date & Time: Los Angeles (7 am), Cincinnati (10 am), Bath (3 pm), Munich (4 pm), Beijing (10 pm), Singapore (10 pm), Sydney (May 26, 12 am)

Zhuoqiong (Charlie) Chen will present the paper titled "Know Thy Enemy: Information Acquisition in Contests".

Abstract of the Paper:
This paper studies the incentives for and the consequences of information acquisition about opponents in contests with independent private values. Two players can spy on each other by privately acquiring a costly, noisy, and private signal about the opponent's value by choosing the signal's accuracy before the contest. Given that they spy on each other, we characterize the unique monotonic equilibrium in the contest whenever it exists. The players may not have the incentives to acquire information when they do not observe each other's accuracies of signals, and always have the incentives when they do observe the accuracies. Acquiring information about opponents may lead to allocative inefficiency but always benefits both players even accounting for its costs.

Chair: Tracy Liu, Co-Chair: Qiang Fu and Lionel Page