Aggregation of Expert Opinions

Dino Gerardi (), Richard McLean () and Andrew Postlewaite ()
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Dino Gerardi: Department of Economics, Yale University
Richard McLean: Department of Economics, Rutgers University

PIER Working Paper Archive from Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania

Abstract: Conflicts of interest arise between a decision maker and agents who have information pertinent to the problem because of differences in their preferences over outcomes. We show how the decision maker can extract the information by distorting the decisions that will be taken, and show that only slight distortions will be necessary when agents are informationally small. We further show that as the number of informed agents becomes large the necessary distortion goes to zero. We argue that the particular mechanisms analyzed are substantially less demanding informationally than those typically employed in implementation and virtual implementation. In particular, the equilibria we analyze are conditionally dominant strategy in a precise sense. Further, the mechanisms are immune to manipulation by small groups of agents.

Keywords: Information aggregation; Asymmetric information; Cheap talk; Experts (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D7 D8 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec and nep-cul
Date: 2005-04-01
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Related works:
Working Paper: Aggregation of Expert Opinions (2005)
Journal Article: Aggregation of expert opinions (2009)
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Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pen:papers:05-016

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