Multi Agent Information Acquisition and Sharing
Dimitri Migrow*, Francesco Squintani
Date: 2018-05-12 3:15 pm – 3:45 pm
Last modified: 2018-05-09
Abstract
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.