Adam Smith Business School

Dr Ina Taneva, University of Edinburgh

"Strategic Ignorance and Information Design"
Tuesday, 28 November. 4 pm
Room 355 Gilbert Scott Building

Abstract

We study information design in strategic settings when agents can publicly commit to not view their private signals. Ignoring the constraints that agents must be willing to view their signals may lead to substantial divergence between the designer’s in-tent and actual outcomes, even in the case where the designer seeks to maximize the agents’ payoffs. We introduce the appropriate equilibrium concept — robust correlated equilibrium — and characterize implementable distributions over states and actions. Requiring robustness to strategic ignorance can explain qualitative properties that standard information design cannot: the designer may provide redundant or even counter-productive information, asymmetric information structures may be strictly optimal in symmetric environments, providing information conditional on players’ choices rather than all at once may hurt the designer, and communication between players may help her. Optimality sometimes requires that players ignore their signals with positive probability.

Bio

I am an Associate Professor / Reader at the School of Economics, University of Edinburgh and a CEPR Research Affiliate in Organizational Economics.

My primary research area is microeconomic theory, with a particular focus on information and mechanism design.

 

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First published: 14 September 2023