Tobias Broer (IIES Stockholm)

“Heterogenous Information Choice in General Equilibrium”

Abstract
We study heterogeneous information acquisition in the dynamic equilibrium of a standard neoclassical economy. Heterogeneity in wealth holdings and labor market productivity,
as in the standard ? environment, implies natural heterogeneity in the incentives to acquire information about the current state of the economy that allows to predict future wages and capital returns. This is because the savings choices of agents with low and high resources are approximately unaffected by future prices, making them unwilling to pay even low prices of information processing. Importantly, the benet of acquiring information is declining in the mass of informed agents, whose countercyclical savings choices make the economy less volatile and information less benecial. We show how, for some values of information cost, this implies that an equilibrium does not exist with a representative agent, while it exists with heterogeneous agents.