Costly Acquisition of (Differentiated) Information

Consumers' choices among many different types of information sub-a-fields are examined in a large, perfectly competitive pure exchange economy in which information serves as a consumption good as well as a device to aid in the maximization of state-dependent utility. Analysis of derived preferences over information and wealth (and the resulting value of information function) implies that individual demands for information are well defined and upper hemicontinuous even though these correspondences fail to be convex valued. Sufficient conditions are given for the consistency of information acquisition decisions so that there exist equilibrium price vectors for physical goods and continuous equilibrium price functions for information in a general equilibrium model.