Abstract: My paper develops a novel procurement auction model with endogenous public information acquisition and ex-post cost uncertainty to study the effect of information policy on procurement cost. Bidders can exert costly effort to learn about the project and update their beliefs about the ex-post cost. I show that information acquisition has two major opposing effects on procurement cost. First, it allows risk-averse bidders to reduce their ex-post cost uncertainty and, thus, their risk premium on bids. Second, the acquired information generates additional information rent, which increases their bids. I estimate the model using unique administrative data from the Indiana Department of Transportation, which publishes all observable outcomes of bidders’ information acquisition on its Question and Answer platform. I obtain two counterfactual results: First, not allowing bidders to acquire information increases average procurement cost by 1.62%. Second, switching the endogenous information acquisition model from a public setting to a private one generates higher expected procurement costs when competition is high. Therefore, if the government can simultaneously encourage competition in the procurement process, the public information acquisition model would be beneficial overall.