Designing Silence: Peer Feedback under Reputational Concerns

Georgy Lukyanov ()

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: How should an organization control what its experts learn from one another between a first opinion and a final one? We study a platform that collects two independent binary forecasts and decides whether the second expert may see the first expert's lodged report before revising, when experts are rewarded for reputation rather than accuracy. The platform commits to a reveal-or-silence lottery conditioned on whether the lodged reports agree. Because non-revelation is informative, silence becomes an instrument of design rather than the absence of one. Our main result is a concealment-ray theorem: along policy rays that hold fixed the composition of the silent pool, the value of every finite downstream decision problem and every locked-report incentive slack is affine. A two-dimensional design problem therefore collapses to full disclosure and two one-dimensional boundaries. At an exact rational profile, a computer-assisted certificate identifies the unique state-classification optimum within the maintained class: disagreement is never revealed, while approximately 71.08 percent of agreements are revealed---just enough to make silence unfavourable news and eliminate a low-ability expert's tendency to stand by a stale forecast. The policy strictly outperforms both sealing and full disclosure, although the gain over full disclosure is modest, and remains uniquely optimal after recalibrating the threshold on an open set of nearby primitives. Two qualifications delimit its reach. Sealing and full disclosure are Blackwell incomparable, so no protocol is best for every downstream objective. Moreover, every policy admits an uninformative equilibrium, so the comparison is conducted within a maintained regular-monotone class.

Date: 2025-09, Revised 2026-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
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