What are the welfare effects of a policy that facilitates for insurance customers to privately and covertly learn about their accident risks? We endogenize the information structure in Stiglitz's classic monopoly insurance model. We first show that his results are robust: For a small information...

If a stochastically monotone aggregate of asymmetrically informed individuals' expectations of a random variable is common information, then the aggregate must be a sufficient statistic, and all the individuals must have the same relevant information and agree on their expectations. If a...

We study a monopoly insurance model with endogenous information acquisition. Through a continuous effort choice, consumers can determine the precision of a privately observed signal that is informative about their accident risk. The equilibrium effort is, depending on parameter values, either...

If a stochastically monotone aggregate of asymmetrically informed agents' expectations of a random variable is common information, then the agents must agree on their expectations. This result is applied to a model of an oligopolistic market where the firms have a common random component of...