Policy with Dispersed Information

George-Marios Angeletos and Alessandro Pavan

No 86, Carlo Alberto Notebooks from Collegio Carlo Alberto

Abstract: Information regarding economic fundamentals is widely dispersed in society, is only imperfectly aggregated through prices or other indicators of aggregate activity, and can not be centralized by the government or any other institution. In this paper we seek to identify policies that can improve the decentralized use of such dispersed information without requiring the government to observe this information. We show that this can be achieved by appropriately designing the contingency of taxation on ex-post public information regarding the realized fundamentals and aggregate activity. When information is common (as in the Ramsey literature) or when agents have private information only about idiosyncratic shocks (as in the Mirrlees literature), the contingency on fundamentals alone suffices for efficiency. When instead agents have private information about aggregate shocks, the contingency on aggregate activity is crucial. An appropriate combination of the two contingencies permits the government to: (i) dampen the impact of noise and hence reduce non-fundamental volatility, without also dampening the impact of fundamentals; (ii) induce agents to internalize informational externalities, and hence improve the speed of social learning; (iii) restore a certain form of constrained efficiency in the decentralized use of information; (iv) guarantee that welfare increases with the provision of any additional information.

Keywords: Optimal policy; private information; complementarities; information externalities; social learning; efficiency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D62 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2008
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cta
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Policy with Dispersed Information (2009)
Working Paper: Policy with Dispersed Information (2008)
Working Paper: Policy with Dispersed Information (2007)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cca:wpaper:86

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