We study learning in perfect competition. A price-taking firm sells a good whose quality is unknown to some buyers. The uninformed buyers use the price to infer information about quality. The presence of noise on the supply prevents perfect learning. Even though the firm is a price-taker,...

I demonstrate a straightforward but apparently widely unrecognized implication of the standard requirements for perfect competition: an economy in which consumers can choose to learn is generally not perfectly competitive. In particular, if endogenous welfare relevant learning is feasible, the...