How should a manager optimally choose transfers to incentivize multiple

agents both to collect and to share costly information? To answer this

question we study a simple model with a principal and two agents. The agents

can obtain costly signals and communicate with each another via

non-verifiable messages (cheap talk). A principal offers a contract which is

separable in the performances of the agents. We characterize the optimal

transfers and show a surprising result that for sufficiently correlated

information and not too high costs of information acquisition an agent's

optimal transfer should depend mainly on the performance of the other agent.