Existence of an Equilibrium for Lower Semicontinuous Information Acquisition Functions.

We consider a two-period model in which a continuumof agents trade in a context of costly information acquisition and systematic heterogeneous expectations biases. Because of systematic biases agents are supposed not to learn from others' decisions. In a previous work under somehow strong technical assumptions a market equilibriumwas proved to exist and the supply and demand functions were proved to be strictly monotonic with respect to the price. Here we extend these results under very weak technical assumptions. We also prove that the equilibrium price maximizes the trading volume and further additional properties (such as the antimonotonicity of the trading volume with respect to the marginal information price). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]