Bias and Negligence with Freedom of Information

Rossella Argenziano and Helen Weeds

The Economic Journal, 2019, vol. 129, issue 624, 2979-2998

Abstract: We analyse decision-making in the presence of Freedom of Information (FOI) rules. A decision-maker chooses whether to acquire costly information to inform his decision regarding a policy action. If information is not disclosed voluntarily a monitor may open a costly investigation, using FOI to access the information. A finding of biased decision-making or negligence in information acquisition generates a reward to the monitor and a penalty to the decision-maker. We find that strengthening FOI to reduce the cost of investigation may increase negligence without necessarily reducing bias. Moreover, increasing the reward for discovering negligence can paradoxically increase negligence in equilibrium.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ej/uez026 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:econjl:v:129:y:2019:i:624:p:2979-2998.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Economic Journal is currently edited by Francesco Lippi

More articles in The Economic Journal from Royal Economic Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press () and ().