Acquisizione e rivelazione di informazioni in un mercato oligopolistico competitivo

Almost the totality of the literature on disclosure of information in competitive markets studies situations in which firms can disclose information about their own product. In this thesis, instead, I study the firm's incentive to acquire and disclose information on the quality of its competitors. The aims of this work are the following: to understand why the practice of revealing information about a competitor is rarely used in the market; to give a motivation for the difference in the use of comparative advertising in different markets. This is achieved through a model of oligopolistic competition with differentiated products. Here two firms (labelled I and E) compete to maximize their expected market share. In this economy firm I can acquire information on the other's product quality at a cost, and then decide whether to truthfully disclose it or to remain silent. The main results I found are the following: in the case in which I's product quality is known this firm acquires information more rarely than the case in which its product quality is unknown, this seems able to explain why in dynamic industries the information spread more rapidly and comparative advertising is more used than in markets that are not as dynamic; the cost range of acquiring information has the power to harsh consumers expectations when firm I remains silent, eventually forcing this firm to always acquire information when the maximum possible cost is low enough.