Gathering imperfect information before signing a contract

I study information gathering for rent-seeking purposes in contracting. In my model, an agent learns his payoff type only after accepting a contract, but can at costs acquire imperfect information while deliberating whether to accept. I show that the principal deters the acquisition if and only if the costs are high. The result stands in contrast to a finding by Cremer and Khalil (1992), who demonstrate that the acquisition of perfect information will always be deterred. A key insight is that the case of imperfect information is an instance of a sequential-screening problem. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.