Can learning cause shorter delays in reaching agreements?

This paper uses a continuous-time war of attrition model to investigate how learning about private payoffs affects delays in reaching agreement. At each point in time, players may receive a private Poisson signal that completely reveals the concession payoff to be high (good-news learning) or low (bad-news learning). In the good-news model, the expected delay is always non-monotonic in the learning rate: an increase in the learning rate prolongs delay in agreement if the learning rate is sufficiently low. In the bad-news model, numerical examples suggest learning prolongs delay as well.