Multi-Agent Information Acquisition and Sharing

Abstract

How should a manager optimally choose transfers to incentivize multiple agents both to collect and to share costly information? To answer this question we study a simple model with a principal and two agents. The agents can obtain costly signals and communicate with each another via non-verifiable messages (cheap talk). A principal offers a contract which is separable in the performances of the agents. We characterize the optimal transfers and show a surprising result that for sufficiently correlated information and not too high costs of information acquisition an agent's optimal transfer should depend mainly on the performance of the other agent.