| Abstract: | A decisionmaker gets independent advice from two experts, who can be of two different types. Experts are risk-neutral and prefer certain policies irrespective of the state of nature, so to induce information-sharing the decisionmaker must reward truthful experts. I show that, in this environment, a heterogeneous committee has no informational advantage over a single expert: a decision rule that encourages one expert to be honest immediately makes honesty less attractive for the other. With a homogenous committee, the higher is the correlation between the experts’ signals, the more the decisionmaker is willing to pay to secure independent advice.Received: April 2004, Accepted: Accepted: January 2005, JEL Classification:
D71, D82Lars Frisell: I thank David Austen-Smith, Tim Feddersen, Johan Lagerlöf, Jan Potters, Ken Shotts, Jonas Vlachos, Jörgen W. Weibull, an anonymous referee, and especially Karl Wärneryd for helpful comments. Financial support from the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation and the Sweden-America Foundation is gratefully acknowledged. |
