  The recent trend for acquiring big data assumes that possessing
quantitatively more and qualitatively finer data necessarily provides an
advantage that may be critical in competitive situations. Using a model complex
adaptive system where agents compete for a limited resource using information
coarse-grained to different levels, we show that agents having access to more
and better data can perform worse than others in certain situations. The
relation between information asymmetry and individual payoffs is seen to be
complex, depending on the composition of the population of competing agents.
