Managing information production in teams

Organised by

• Department of Economics

A principal has a stream of related decisions to make under imperfect information. He employs a finite group of agents to costly acquire information. The principal jointly designs task allocation, incentive schemes, and monitoring structures to robustly implement all agents engaging in information acquisition and truthful reporting as the unique rationalisable action profile. We highlight a novel trade-off between task assignment diversification and peer monitoring efficiency. With identical information acquisition costs, agents are monitored and compensated symmetrically. With cost disparities, heightened monitoring is directed towards high-cost agents, allowing the principal to capitalise on the asymmetry in agent costs to his advantage.

Co-authors: Shota Ichihashi (Queen's University) and Dihan Zou (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)