Costly Information Acquisition and Optimal Information Choice

This paper studies the problem of costly information acquisition by focusing on the case of linear costs (e.g., rational inattention), and provides a characterization of optimal information using a supporting hyperplane argument. The characterization result is also applied on a pricing problem in a single buyer-seller setting, where the buyer can acquire information before purchasing a risky project from the seller. It is shown that the optimal price should be non-monotonic in the degree of the buyer's cost of information acquisition.