Consider an agent who decides whether to employ an information structure to learn about a payoff-relevant state of the world before making a decision. Information is costly either because (1) the agent has to wait some time until the information structure becomes available and is impatient, or because (2) she has to pay a fixed and menu-independent cost to use the information structure. For each menu of options the analyst observes random choice from the menu and whether the agent acquires the information. We give an axiomatic characterization of when this random choice is consistent with either of the cases (1) or (2). We identify the information structure the agent can employ, as well as its costs. We also discuss implications of our approach for sequential sampling.

考虑一个在做出决定之前决定是否使用信息结构来了解与收益相关的世界状况的代理。信息是昂贵的，或者是因为（1）代理人必须等待一段时间直到信息结构可用并且急躁，或者因为（2）她必须支付固定的且与菜单无关的费用才能使用信息结构。对于每个选项菜单，分析人员都会从菜单中观察随机选择，以及代理商是否获取信息。我们给出这种随机选择何时与情况（1）或（2）一致的公理化特征。我们确定代理商可以使用的信息结构及其成本。我们还讨论了我们的方法对顺序采样的影响。