Addressing Strategic Uncertainty with Incentives and Information
AEA Papers and Proceedings
vol. 112,
May 2022
(pp. 431-37)
Abstract
A principal privately contracts with a set of agents who then simultaneously make a binary decision. Each contract specifies an individual allocation and the information the agent is given about a fundamental state and other agents' contracts. We study the principal's optimal scheme that induces a desired action profile as the unique rationalizable outcome. Our main result reduces this multiagent problem to a two-step procedure where information is designed agent-by-agent: the principal chooses a fundamental-state-contingent distribution over agent rankings and, separately for each agent, the agent's information about the realized ranking and fundamental states. We illustrate with a team-production application.Citation
Halac, Marina, Elliot Lipnowski, and Daniel Rappoport. 2022. "Addressing Strategic Uncertainty with Incentives and Information." AEA Papers and Proceedings, 112: 431-37. DOI: 10.1257/pandp.20221087Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- D81 Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
- D82 Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
- D86 Economics of Contract: Theory