Designing communication hierarchies

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Migrow, Dimitri
• 署名单位: University of Calgary
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC THEORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0531
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2021.105349
• 发表日期: 2021
• 关键词: Organizational design; strategic communication; information aggregation

摘要

This paper studies the design of communication hierarchies in a setup with a principal and multiple agents with private agendas. The agents observe unverifiable binary signals relevant to the principal's choice and the principal is uninformed. The principal can only decide who reports to whom and in which order. We show that a two-layer hierarchy where all agents report directly to the principal is dominated by hierarchies with a larger number of layers. We characterize conditions for the choice of a three-layer hierarchy with a single intermediator, and for the choice of a three-layer hierarchy with two intermediators where the agents are separated according to their preferences. (c) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.