Speed and Quality of Collective Decision Making: Incentives for Information Provision

Hans Peter Grüner (1)

1 University of Mannheim and CEPR

We study a one-shot information aggregation problem in which agents have to provide e®ort in order to understand the information they are supposed to process. Agents have a common interest in reaching a good decision but suffer from an individual cost of providing eff®ort. Showing that any problem which is incentive compatible for a single information processor is incentive compatible for a decentralized organization, but not vice versa, we derive a new rationale for decentralized information processing. For a class of problems, the fastest organization--the reduced tree proposed by Radner (1993) --yields also the best incentives for information processing.

Mots clés: Information processing; hierarchies; incentives for information provision

Domaines: Économie et finance quantitative [q-fin]

Hans Peter Grüner. Speed and Quality of Collective Decision Making: Incentives for Information Provision. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2010, 76 (3), pp.734. ⟨10.1016/j.jebo.2010.08.013⟩. ⟨hal-00911831⟩