MRU Brown Bag Seminar: Pavel Ilinov CERGE-EI

"When bias is useful: delegation to a rationally inattentive agent”

Abstract

A principal needs to delegate a decision under uncertainty to an agent and chooses among candidates who differ in their prior beliefs. Prior to making the decision, the agents can flexibly acquire costly information. We show that the principal can generally benefit from delegation when the agent's belief differs from the belief of the principal. We also show that the same choice probabilities can be implemented in the best alternative choice problem by the usage of the system of bonuses. However, this equivalence result does not necessarily hold in the general problem formulation.

Contact person: Andrei Matveenko