Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/55169 
Year of Publication: 
2010
Series/Report no.: 
Working Paper No. 674
Publisher: 
Queen Mary University of London, School of Economics and Finance, London
Abstract: 
This paper studies optimal decision rules for a decision maker who can consult two experts in an environment without monetary payments. This extends the previous work by Holmström (1984) and Alonso and Matouschek (2008) who consider environments with one expert. In order to derive optimal decision rules, we prove a constant-threat result that states that any out-of-equilibrium pair of recommendations by the experts are punished with an action that is independent of their reports. A particular property of an optimal decision rule is that it is simple and constant for a large set of experts' preferences and distribution of their private information. Hence, it is robust in the sense that it is not affected by errors in specifying these features of the environment. By contrast, the constructions of optimal outcomes absent commitment or with only one expert are sensitive to model details.
Subjects: 
communication
information
noise
experts
constant threat
JEL: 
C72
D82
D83
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size
301.08 kB





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.