Information acquisition in committees

The goal of this paper is to illustrate the significance of information acquisition in mechanism design. We provide a stark example of a mechanism design problem in a collective choice environment with information acquisition. We concentrate on committees that are comprised of agents sharing a common goal and having a joint task. Members of the committee decide whether to acquire costly information or not at the outset and are then asked to report their private information. The designer can choose the size of the committee, as well as the procedure by which it selects the collective choice, i.e., the correspondence between agents' reports and distributions over collective choices. We show that the ex ante optimal device may be ex post inefficient, i.e., lead to suboptimal aggregation of information from a statistical point of view. For particular classes of parameters, we describe the full structure of the optimal mechanisms.     

Ex ante efficiency implies incentive compatibility

We show that when agents become informationally negligible in a large economy with asymmetric information, every ex ante efficient allocation must be incentive compatible. This means that any ex ante core or Walrasian allocation is incentive compatible. The corresponding result is false for fixed finite-agent economies with asymmetric information. An example is also constructed to show that the ex post version of the result does not hold. Furthermore, we show that the result is sharp in the sense that it will fail to hold if one relaxes any of the main assumptions, namely, strong conditional independence on the information structure, strict concavity on the utility functions, type independence on the utility functions and endowments.      

Information acquisition and welfare effect in a model of competitive financial markets

We analyze welfare effect of information acquisition for a model of competitive financial markets with diverse information and rational expectations. We show that in the fully revealing rational expectations equilibrium, each agent’s gain from trade in ex ante utility decreases as more agents become informed. An implication of the result is that market efficiency and ex ante Pareto optimality are not compatible in competitive financial markets with diverse information and rational expectations. Our result can be viewed as complementary to the Grossman paradox, which shows that market efficiency and individuals’ incentives to acquire information are not compatible. This paper is the first step in a projected exploration of welfare effect of information acquisition in models with diverse information.     

Conformism,peer pressure and adverse selection

To examine the effects of peer pressure in adverse selection problem, we define a peer pressure function that represents the psychological costs and incorporate it into the agent's utility function. Based on these assumptions, the efficient agent who has conformity preference produces less outputs than the first-best level, while the inefficient agent produces more than the second-best level of standard adverse selection output when the agents feel peer pressure among themselves. Although the production gap between the utility functions under peer pressure narrows, the gap of the ex post information rent goes wider as the information rent of efficient agents increases. Our theoretical results are consistent with some empirical/experimental findings.     

Pricing Monitoring Uncertainty in Climate Policy

This article assesses the environmental and economic efficiency of three different approaches to treat monitoring uncertainty in climate policy, namely prescribing uncertainty, setting minimum certainty thresholds and pricing uncertainty through a discount. Our model of the behavior of profit-maximizing agents demonstrates that under the simplest set of assumptions the regulator has no interest in reducing monitoring uncertainty. However, in the presence of information asymmetry, monitoring uncertainty may hamper the economic and environmental performance of climate policy due to adverse selection. In a mandatory policy, prescribing a reasonable level of uncertainty is preferable if the regulator has enough information to determine this level. For voluntary mechanisms, such as carbon offsets, allowing agents to set their own monitoring uncertainty below a maximum threshold or discounting carbon revenues in proportion to monitoring uncertainty are the best approaches for the regulator to mitigate the negative effects of information asymmetry. These conclusions are much more pronounced when agents do not accrue revenues from their mitigation action, other than carbon. Our analysis of monitoring uncertainty under information asymmetry, which results in heterogeneity in the agents’ benefits from abatement, generalizes the classical trade-off between production efficiency and information rents.     

部分契约、控制权转移与揭示机制

区别于完全契约和不完全契约理论,基于对名义控制权和实际控制权的区分,Aghion等(2002;2003)提出部分契约概念,强调代理人人力资本的重要性和实际控制权的可转移性.在此基础上,我们放松Aghion等(2003)的研究假设,基于贝叶斯法则对该理论做一般化分析并对不同状态下转移控制机的机制效力进行比较.我们强调在更一般的情况下,除了引人价格机制以外,引入声誉作为保障该信息揭示机制效力的激励约束机制是必要的且比价格机制列为适用.该理论对于解释信誉,授权等理论问题,以及指导中国公司治理实践具有参考价值.     

Endogenous information and stochastic contracts

A growing literature analyzes revenue-maximizing contracts for situations in which agents can acquire private information before they decide whether to join the contract. It is conjectured that the results also apply to the more natural scenario where information can be acquired either before or after signing. This paper shows that, in fact, the latter scenario is more favorable for the principal. Using stochastic contracts, she can induce information acquisition with some probability and yet appropriate the generated surplus.     

Beyond Behavioral Finance

Throughout its history, finance theory has made certain simplifying assumptions regarding human behavior and concerned itself with whether the implications of these assumptions were true and not with whether the assumptions themselves were. Recently, however, more interest has been shown in experimental investigation of these assumptions, and the resultant behavioral finance has been presented as a significant departure from the current research paradigm. Recent research in cognitive science, however, is finding that the mind can and does work differently than traditional finance assumes, and the differences between the behavioral assumptions of traditional finance and the supposedly more realistic ones of today's behavioral finance are frequently superficial. Knowledge and knowing are likely to be profoundly different from the forms in which we have incorporated them in our extant models, both traditional and behavioral, and they differ in ways similar to those which, for example, have differentiated corporations from corporate images in marketing. To truly understand what is going on we must go beyond behavioral finance to address these differences.     

Money and Information

This paper investigates the role of money in markets in which producers have private information about the quality of the goods they supply. When the fraction of high-quality producers in the economy is given, money promotes the production of high-quality goods, which improves the quality mix and welfare unambiguously. When this fraction is endogenous, however, we find that money can decrease welfare relative to the barter equilibrium. The origin of this inefficiency is that money provides consumption insurance to low-quality producers, which can result in a higher fraction of low-quality producers in the monetary equilibrium. Finally, we find that most often agents acquire more costly information in the monetary equilibrium than in the barter equilibrium. Consequently, money is welfare-enhancing because it promotes useful production and exchange, but not because it saves information costs.     

Was the deflation of the depression anticipated? An inference using real-time data

Theories that explain the behavior of the economy during the Depression are based on assumptions about agents’ expectations about future price trends. This paper uses an alternative methodological approach which utilizes real-time information from the Depression period to infer whether deflation was anticipated. The information includes the forecasting methodology of that time as well as projections about anticipated output that were obtained from the textual analysis of business statements, converting qualitative to quantitative data. We infer that deflation was not anticipated because agents did not expect economic output to consistently decrease.     

The relevance of private information in mechanism design

Recent results in mechanism design show that as long as agents have correlated private information and are sufficiently risk neutral, it is possible to design mechanisms that leave agents with arbitrarily small information rents. We show that these full-rent-extraction results hinge on the implicit assumption that the agents’ beliefs uniquely determine their preferences. We present an example of the voluntary provision of a public good in which this assumption is relaxed, and consequently, even in highly correlated environments, if agents’ beliefs do not uniquely determine their preferences, then the extraction of the agents’ entire information rents is impossible.     

The structure of information networks

We develop a strategic model of information acquisition in networks where agents pay for all the pieces of information they acquire, including those through indirect links. The cost of information depends on the distance it traverses in the network. We consider two possibilities in this context: (1) costs increasing with distance, and (2) costs decreasing with distance. The paper also examines situations where it is more expensive to acquire information of higher value. We show that there is almost no divergence between the efficient and Nash equilibrium information architectures. We then study the effect of decay in networks where information through longer paths is cheaper. Finally, we also examine a model with costly link formation that combines both types of cost related assumptionsWe are grateful to Hans Haller, Rob Gilles, Susanne Maria Schmidt, Sumit Joshi, Georg Erber, Beth Allen, Mark Machina, Bob Martin, Johanna Francis, Cheryl Long, Raja Kali, Kaz Miyagiwa, Micheal Kosfeld, Bibhudutta Panda and two anonymous referees for helpful suggestions. The paper has further benefited from the comments of participants at Game Theory and Applications Mumbai 2003, Royal Economic Society Meetings 2003, SED 2004 and GAMES 2004. Sudipta Sarangi acknowledges the hospitality of DIW Berlin where a part of this research was carried out. Rajgopal Kannan acknowledges the support of NSF grants IIS-0329738 and IIS-0312632     

Information Invariance in Variable-Population Social-Choice Problems

We examine the possibilities of extending Sen's taxonomy of fixed-population information assumptions regarding the measurability and interpersonal comparability of individual utilities to social-choice problems where the population may vary. It is shown that in order to avoid impossibility results, informationally more demanding assumptions than in the fixed-population framework are required. We provide characterizations of variable-population social-welfare orderings based on information assumptions, and we suggest a way of generating the required informational environment by means of norms that impose a domain restriction on the set of possible utility profiles.     

Information acquisition and full surplus extraction

It is well known that when agents' types are correlated, the mechanism designer can extract the entire surplus. This creates an incentive for agents to acquire information about other agents' types. Robust lotteries (are payment schemes that) support full extraction and partially robust lotteries support efficient implementation in the presence of information acquisition opportunities. Necessary and sufficient conditions for existence of robust and partially robust lotteries are derived. If an agent's information signal spans other agents' types then robust lotteries do not exist. However, if all agents report their signal realizations then robust lotteries exist in an extended type space.     

Escaping Poverty: Risk-Taking and Endogenous Inequality in a Model of Equilibrium Growth

Recent macroeconomic models of income distribution generate equilibria characterized as poverty traps. These models specify a production indivisibility such that, due to problems of asymmetric information in credit or capital markets, poor agents are never able to acquire the resources necessary to overcome the indivisibility. In the context of an equilibrium growth model, this paper demonstrates that faced with such constraints, poor, risk-averse agents have incentives to voluntarily take on risk in the hopes of exiting poverty. Each period they remain in poverty, they sacrifice a small amount of current consumption to pool resources for this risky activity. Risk-taking, economic mobility, and the distribution of income are generated endogenously. Furthermore, beginning from identical endowments, “initial” inequality also emerges endogenously. It is shown that voluntary risk-taking eliminates many potential steady-state equilibria of this and other models—those that exhibit individual poverty traps. All agents (or dynasties) expect to escape at some future date, perhaps after an extended spell in poverty.     

Delays and equilibria with large and small information in social learning

The general model of social learning with irreversible investment and endogenous timing is analyzed for any distribution of private informations. Strategic complementarities and multiple equilibria appear which are generated solely by information externalities. Different equilibria generate strikingly different amounts of information. The impacts of various assumptions (bounded beliefs, large number of agents, discrete time and short periods) are examined carefully. The properties are robust to the introduction of observation noise with a continuum of agents.     

Designing credit agent incentives to prevent mission drift in pro-poor microfinance institutions

Credit agents in microfinance institutions (MFIs) must be given incentives to acquire information on potential borrowers and select them in accordance with the MFI's objectives. We show that while giving incentives has no cost in for-profit MFIs, it is costly in pro-poor MFIs: When repayment and wealth are positively correlated, a pro-poor MFI cannot obtain the selection of poor clients in the proportion it wishes with incentives based solely on repayment. It then becomes necessary to audit the share of very poor borrowers selected by an agent in order to provide the latter with adequate incentives. When audit costs are large, pro-poor MFIs may have to forego selection on wealth — and use other targeting devices such as working in impoverished geographical locations. Driven by donor concerns with ‘mission drift’ away from the poor, audits on the wealth status of clients have been introduced at the level of MFIs. We show that introducing pro-poor incentives requires extending such audits to the level of credit agents.     

Endogenous Growth: Fragile Foundations?

The Frankel, Romer and Lucas theories of endogenous growth rest on the assumptions of knowledge‐based externalities and price‐taking representative agents. It is argued that, in a context of long‐run growth, these assumptions are mutually incompatible, that representative agents will cooperate to internalize the externalities and will cease to be price takers, and that, therefore, the relevance of theories based on those assumptions must be questioned.     

We can't disagree forever

Under the assumption of common priors, if the information partitions of two agents are finite, then simply by communicating back and forth and revising their posteriors the two agents will converge to a common equilibrium posterior, even though they may base their posteriors on quite different information. Furthermore, given any integer, n, one can construct an example in which the revision process not only takes n steps to converge, but no evident revision occurs—for (n?1) steps both agents repeat the same conflicting posteriors—until the last step, when the two agents decide to agree. Common knowledge of each other's posterior does not necessarily lead agents to the posterior they would have agreed upon had information been directly exchanged. On the other hand, the examples that are characterized by a discrepancy between the direct and indirect communication equilibrium, are rare: with probability 1, the revision process constructed here leads the two agents in one step to the direct communication equilibrium.     

THE ECONOMICS OF ILLUSION*

When individuals choose not only goods, but also how to process information, there is a bias: people tend to process information so that they feel good about themselves. This bias is particularly important in voting behavior, where agents have almost no individual effect on public choice outcomes, and therefore almost no incentive for unbiased use of information. Two examples are given. In one example, an adaptation of the classic overdepletion problem, the public chooses not to counteract externalities by appropriate tax policy. In the second example public policy follows the choices of experts, contrary to the interest of the public.