A Role for Instructions

Irene Valsecchi

No 2005.62, Working Papers from Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei

Abstract: The paper is concerned with instructions as a way of setting premises for subsequent decisions in models of teams à la Marschak-Radner, under information diversification. The paper suggests that instructions can bridge people’s differences in knowledge: they do not require mutual understanding between the sender and the receiver as other forms of communication do. In particular, the knowledge of both the team payoff function and the team organisation can be ordered according to hierarchical ranks. First, the paper shows the equivalence between commands and communication in Marschak and Radner (1972). Second, it derives the requirements in terms of knowledge of the members that follow from given structures of task assignment, information diversification and message flows. Hierarchical ranks are shown to correspond to different degrees of intelligibility of the members with respect to the team operations.

Keywords: Instructions; Hierarchy; Knowledge; Decentralisation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D23 L23 M11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://feem-media.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/w ... oads/NDL2005-062.pdf (application/pdf)

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:fem:femwpa:2005.62

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alberto Prina Cerai ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).