The paper analyzes the relationship between decision rules and information acquisition in decision-making processes. The setting under consideration is one where information acquisition and decision making are assigned to different agents and the decision-maker's preferences are not observable....

We consider an industry characterized by a regulated natural monopoly in the upstream market and Cournot competition with demand uncertainty in the unregulated downstream market. The realization of demand cannot be observed by the regulator, whilst it can be privately observed at some cost by...