9,833 research outputs found

    Due diligence, research joint ventures, and incentives to innovate

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    The decision to cooperate within R&D joint ventures is often based on `expert advice.' Such advice typically originates in a due diligence process, which assesses the R&D joint venture's profitability, for example, by appraising the achievability of synergies. We show that if the experts who advise the owners considering forming an R&D joint venture are also responsible for R&D efforts, they can have incentives to withhold information about the extent of those synergies. Owners optimally react by reducing the incentives to innovate in low-value projects developed within R&D joint ventures and in high-value projects developed within competing research organizations.Research and development, due diligence, experts' advice, joint venture, synergies, asymmetric information, moral hazard, information withholding (concealing) and revelation

    Truthful ownership transfer with expert advice: Blending mechanism design with and without money

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    When a company undergoes a merger or transfers its ownership, the existing governing body has an opinion on which buyer should take over as the new owner. Similar situations occur while assigning the host of big sports tournaments, like the World Cup or the Olympics. In all these settings, the values of the external bidders are as important as the opinions of the internal experts. Motivated by such scenarios, we consider a social welfare maximizing approach to design and analyze truthful mechanisms in {\em hybrid social choice} settings, where payments can be imposed to the bidders, but not to the experts. Since this problem is a combination of mechanism design with and without monetary transfers, classical solutions like VCG cannot be applied, making this a novel mechanism design problem. We consider the simple but fundamental scenario with one expert and two bidders, and provide tight approximation guarantees of the optimal social welfare. We distinguish between mechanisms that use ordinal and cardinal information, as well as between mechanisms that base their decisions on one of the two sides (either the bidders or the expert) or both. Our analysis shows that the cardinal setting is quite rich and admits several non-trivial randomized truthful mechanisms, and also allows for closer-to-optimal welfare guarantees

    Explaining and trusting expert evidence: What is a ‘sufficiently reliable scientific basis’?

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    Through a series of judicial decisions and Practice Directions, the English courts have developed a rule that expert evidence must have ‘a sufficiently reliable scientific basis to be admitted’. There is a dearth of case-law as to what degree of reliability is ‘sufficient’. This article argues that the test should be interpreted as analogous to one developed in the law of hearsay: expert evidence (scientific or otherwise) must be ‘potentially safely reliable’ in the context of the evidence as a whole. The implications of this test will vary according to the relationship between the expert evidence and the other evidence in the case. The article identifies three main patterns into which this relationship falls. Whether the jury relies upon the evidence will depend upon what they regard as the best explanation of the evidence and how far they trust the expert. Whether their reliance is safe (as a basis for conviction) depends on whether they could rationally rule out explanations consistent with innocence, and whether the degree to which they take the expert’s evidence on trust is consistent with prosecution’s burden of proving the essential elements of its case, including the reliability of any scientific techniques on which it relies

    Truthful ownership transfer with expect advice

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    When a company undergoes a merger or transfers its ownership, the existing governing body has an opinion on which buyer should take over as the new owner. Similar situations occur while assigning the host of big sports tournaments, like the World Cup or the Olympics. In all these settings, the values of the external bidders are as important as the opinions of the internal experts. Motivated by such scenarios, we consider a social welfare maximizing approach to design and analyze truthful mechanisms in hybrid social choice settings, where payments can be imposed to the bidders, but not to the experts. Since this problem is a combination of mechanism design with and without monetary transfers, classical solutions like VCG cannot be applied, making this a novel mechanism design problem. We consider the simple but fundamental scenario with one expert and two bidders, and provide tight approximation guarantees of the optimal social welfare. We distinguish between mechanisms that use ordinal and cardinal information, as well as between mechanisms that base their decisions on one of the two sides (either the bidders or the expert) or both. Our analysis shows that the cardinal setting is quite rich and admits several non-trivial randomized truthful mechanisms, and also allows for closer-to-optimal welfare guarantees

    Repeated Cheap-Talk Games of Common Interest between a Decision-Maker and an Expert of Unknown Statistical Bias

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    Two agents are engaged in a joint activity that yields a common perperiod payoff at two rounds of play. The expert announces the probability that the current state of the world is low, instead of high, at each stage. Having received the report of the expert, the decision-maker takes action at every period according to his posterior beliefs. At the end of each round of play, the true current state is verifiable. The distinctive assumption of the paper is that the decision-maker makes a subjective appraisal of the expert’s reliability: he considers the expert’s true forecasts as the outcomes of an experiment of unknown statistical bias. The paper shows that the expert will have instrumental reputational concerns, related to the future estimate of the systematic error associated to his predictions. In contrast with previous work, reputational concerns are shown to enhance the credibility of the initial messages, and to increase both the agents’ expected payoff at the first round of play in equilibrium. The equilibrium messages will be noisy, but noisiness will be less costly than it would be in single-stage games.Opinion, Expert, Strategic Communication

    Referrals

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    Specialization requires that workers deal with some valuable opportunities themselves and refer other, possibly unverifiable, opportunities to other workers. How do markets and organizations ensure the matching of opportunities with talent in the presence of informational asymmetries about their value? The cost of providing incentives for effort in this context is that they increase the risk of the agent appropriating an opportunity she should refer upstream. Thus spot markets are severely limited in their ability to support referrals, as they involve very powerful effort incentives on those opportunities kept by the referring agents. We show that partnerships, in which agents agree to share opportunities and the income from the opportunities, appear endogenously as a solution to this problem. Partnership contracts support better communication rules at the expense of biasing effort provision away from first best for all activities. The structure of the contract depends both on the frequency of communications and on the interaction between the relative skill of the agents and the direction of the referral flow.

    Delegation versus authority

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    The paper studies the role of delegation and authority within a principal-agent relation in which a non-contractible action has to be taken. The agent has private information relevant for the principal, but has policy preferences different from the principal. Consequently, an information revelation problem arises. We contribute to the literature by assuming transferable utility and contractibility of messages and decision rights. While delegation leads to loss of control, it facilitates the agent’s participation and leads to an informed decision. Moreover, message-contingent delegation creates incentives for information revelation. We derive the optimal contract for the principal and investigate when delegation outperforms authority. -- Das Papier untersucht die Bestimmungsgründe für die Delegation von Entscheidungen in Organisationen. Wir betrachten eine Prinzipal-Agent Beziehung, in der eine Entscheidung getroffen werden muss, die vertraglich nicht festgeschrieben werden kann. Der Agent verfügt über für den Prinzipal relevante private Information, hat aber andere Entscheidungspräferenzen als der Prinzipal. Im Unterschied zur bisherigen Literatur betrachten wir den Fall, dass Nutzen transferierbar ist, und dass der Prinzipal sein Entscheidungsrecht in Abhängigkeit eines Berichtes des Agenten an diesen abtreten kann. Delegation führt einerseits zu einem Kontrollverlust für den Prinzipal. Andererseits erleichtert sie die Partizipation des Agenten und führt zu einer informierten Entscheidung. Darüber hinaus schafft Delegation Anreize zur Informationsoffenlegung, wenn dem Agenten das Entscheidungsrecht in Abhängigkeit seines Berichtes übertragen wird. Wir untersuchen, wann es für den Prinzipal optimal ist, die Entscheidung zu delegieren.Delegation,Partial Contracting,Mechanism Design,Imperfect Commitment,Transferable Utility
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