Costly information acquisition in a speculative attack: Theory and experiments∗

We solve and test experimentally a global game of speculative attack where agents choose, at a cost, the precision of their private signal. We prove existence of a unique equilibrium in the coordination game and explore strategic incentives in information acquisition. In the experiment, we find that subjects follow the strategies suggested by the theory. However, contrary to our predictions, as signals become more precise the actions of subjects move towards effi ciency and not risk dominance, which contradicts previous well known results of global games. We document empirically a path to convergence towards the effi cient equilibrium under complete information.