Private information, risk aversion, and the evolution of market research

Abstract

On a homogeneous oligopoly market informed sellers are fully aware of market demand whereas uninformed sellers only know the distribution. We first derive the market results when sellers are risk averse, similarly to Ponssard (1979) who assumed risk neutrality throughout. With the help of these results evolutionary processes are formulated according to which sellers can switch to market research or refrain from it depending on the difference in profits of informed and uninformed sellers. We derive the evolutionarily stable number of informed sellers and discuss how it is influenced by market parameters.