Partial Information Sharing in Cournot Oligopoly∗

We study the incentives of Cournot oligopolists to acquire and disclose information on a common cost (or demand) parameter. Since information acquisition is such that firms may fail to acquire information, firms can credibly conceal unfavorable news while dis-closing favorable news. This paper compares the incentives, profits and welfare under such a partial disclosure regime with the regimes where firms commit to share all or no information. We show that, for sufficiently low (high) information acquisition costs, a firm (an-titrust authority) prefers voluntary disclosure to precommitment. Moreover, incentives and expected profits are often non-monotonic in the amount of information disclosed