INFORMATION GATHERING IN ORGANIZATIONS: EQUILIBRIUM, WELFARE, AND OPTIMAL NETWORK STRUCTURE

• 成果类型: Article; Proceedings Paper
• 署名作者: Calvo-Armengol, Antoni; de Marti Beltran, Joan
• 署名单位: Autonomous University of Barcelona; ICREA; Pompeu Fabra University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1542-4766
• DOI: 10.1162/JEEA.2009.7.1.116
• 发表日期: 2009
• 页码: 116-161
• 关键词: social value; COMMUNICATION; firm; complementarities; COORDINATION; performance; hierarchies; KNOWLEDGE; games; team

摘要

We model an organization as a game in which all agents share a common decision problem and some level of coordination is necessary between individual actions. Agents have individual private information concerning the task they have to perform, and they share this private information through pairwise channels of communication. We analyze how this communication pattern, modeled by means of a network structure, affects individual behavior and aggregate welfare. In the unique equilibrium of this Bayesian game, each agent's optimal action depends on a properly defined knowledge index that measures how the aggregation of information helps him to infer higher-order beliefs about other's information after communication. Adding communication channels is not always beneficial for the organization because it can lead to mis-coordination. We single out the geometry of interagent communication links that the manager could implement in order to improve the organization's performance.