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A platoon commander has a helicopter to support two squads, which encounter two types of missions -- critical or routine --on a daily basis. During a mission, a squad always benefits from having the helicopter, but the benefit is greater during a critical mission than during a routine mission. Because the commander cannot verify the mission type beforehand, a selfish squad would always claim a critical mission to compete for the helicopterâ which leaves the commander no choice but to assign the helicopter at random. In order to encourage truthful reports from the squads, we design a token system that works as follows. Each squad keeps a token bank, with tokens deposited at a certain frequency. A squad must spend either 1 or 2 tokens to request the helicopter, while the commander assigns the helicopter to the squad who spends more tokens, or breaks a tie at random. The two selfish squads become players in a two-person non-zero-sum game. We find the Nash Equilibrium of this game, and use numerical examples to illustrate the benefit of the token system. / US Navy (USN) author.

The aim of this paper is to provide insights of market intelligence and answer to the question “What is market intelligence?” by reviewing existing literature of market intelligence. This study also aims to investigate the connection between market intelligence and Game theory, which is believed by the authors to create the foundation for market intelligence studies. The search of relevant material for this literature review was conducted by using the databases of Halmstad University and Google Scholar. Due to the lack of literature on market intelligence as an overall theory, also other literature, such as books, were utilized besides the articles. This study recognizes six theoretical connections based on the reviewed literature and Game theory. Also, a general definition of market intelligence was recognized as a result of the literature review.

Ma thèse étudie le mécanisme de l’acquisition et de l’approvisionnement des informations. Il est appliqué à trois situations. Le premier chapitre (travaillé avec Georgy Lukyanov) développe un modèle dans lequel l’émetteur communique stratégiquement avec un groupe de récepteurs. Les gains des récepteurs dépendent des informations de l’émetteur. Ceci indique que, en dépit de la bienveillance de l’émetteur, le conflit des intérêts entre l’émetteur et les récepteurs apparaît de façon endogène à la présence de friction de la coordination. Par conséquent, l’équilibre de communication est imparfait : les nouvelles extrêmes, bonnes ou mauvaises, sont relevées mais les nouvelles relativement neutres ne sont pas prises en compte. Donc, un biais exogène dans les préférences de l’émetteur peut améliorer la communication et augmenter le bien-être. Le second chapitre (travaillé avec Takuro Yamashita) parle du problème de la divulgation optimale des informations dans le mécanisme désigné où le principal peut s’engager dans sa divulgation et aussi dans son mécanisme. Au début, on offre un résultat caractéristique pour optimiser la politique de révélation complète. Pour appliquer le résultat, on montre que le principal (vendeur) préfère toujours révéler toutes les informations relatives aux récepteurs de la vente aux enchères générale. Dans le cas du commerce bilatéral où son but est le surplus avec une légère condition sur l’environnement, il ne trouve pas optimal de révéler toutes les informations. Pour une procédure de vote, les votants peuvent choisir entre le statu quo et la réforme. On démontre que le principal doit révéler toutes les informations sur le bénéfice global mais qu’il ne doit révéler aucune information sur le bénéfice individuel de chaque agent. Dans le troisième chapitre on montre que, contrairement à l’idée conventionnelle selon laquelle les agents qui ont des convictions hétérogènes vont s’entendre à long terme (suite aux nouvelles informations), leurs convictions peuvent diverger s’ils sont rationnellement inattentifs. Quand l’attention a un coût, le choix optimal des agents est d’accepter les nouvelles informations qui leur paraissent plus vraisemblables. Cela va conduire à un apprentissage conformiste. Ainsi, les agents qui ont des croyances éloignées de la vérité réagiront moins que les agents qui ont des croyances proches de la vérité. Ceci va mener à une divergence de leurs anticipations. Je caractérise la condition de la divergence de croyance et je montre que ça a plus de chance d’arriver quand la vérité est plus extrême et que le coût de l’attention est moins important. / My thesis studies the mechanism of endogenous information acquisition and provision, and applies it into three applications. The first chapter (joint with Georgy Lukyanov) develops a model in which the sender strategically communicates with a group of receivers whose payoffs depend on the sender’s information. It is shown that, in the presence of coordination frictions, conflict of interests between the sender and the receivers arises endogenously, in spite of the sender’s benevolence. As a result, equilibrium communication is imperfect: extremely good or bad news get disclosed, while relatively “neutral” information is withheld. Consequently, an exogenous bias in the sender’s preferences can improve communication and raise welfare. The second chapter (joint with Takuro Yamashita) considers the problem of optimal information disclosure in mechanism design where the principal can commit to his disclosure policy as well as to his mechanism. We first provide a characterization result for the optimality of the full disclosure policy. Applying this result, in a generalized auction setting we show that the principal (seller) always prefers to disclose all the relevant information to the agents. In a bilateral trade setting where his objective is surplus, under a mild condition on the environment, he does not find optimal to reveal all the information. In a voting application where voters choose between either the status quo or a reform, we show that the principal should reveal all information regarding to the aggregate benefit from the reform but reveal no information about individual benefit for each agent. The third chapter shows that, in contrast to conventional idea that agents with heterogenous beliefs will agree in the long-term as they learn from new information, their beliefs may diverge if agents’ learning is rationally inattentive. When attention is costly, agents optimally choose to acquire potentially new information which they believe most likely to come, leading to a conformism learning. Hence, agents whose initial beliefs are far from the truth will react less often compared to agents whose beliefs are closer to the truth, leading to a divergence in agents’ beliefs in expectation. I characterize the condition for belief divergence and show that it is more likely to happen when the truth is more extreme and the attention cost is moderate.