Optimally Biased Expertise
Fuente:
arXiv
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| Autori principali: | , , , |
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| Natura: | Preprint |
| Pubblicazione: |
2022
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| Soggetti: | |
| Accesso online: | |
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| _version_ | 1866909709511950336 |
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| author | Ilinov, Pavel Matveenko, Andrei Senkov, Maxim Starkov, Egor |
| author_facet | Ilinov, Pavel Matveenko, Andrei Senkov, Maxim Starkov, Egor |
| contents | We show that in delegation problems, a principal benefits from belief misalignment vis-à-vis an agent when the latter can flexibly acquire costly information. The agent optimally succumbs to confirmatory learning, leading him to favor the ex ante optimal action. We show that the principal prefers to mitigate this by hiring an agent who is ex ante more uncertain about which action is optimal. This is optimal even when the principal is herself biased towards some action: the benefit always outweighs the cost of a small misalignment. Optimally misaligned agent considers weakly more actions than an aligned agent. All results continue to hold when delegation is replaced by communication. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2209_13689 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2022 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Optimally Biased Expertise Ilinov, Pavel Matveenko, Andrei Senkov, Maxim Starkov, Egor Theoretical Economics We show that in delegation problems, a principal benefits from belief misalignment vis-à-vis an agent when the latter can flexibly acquire costly information. The agent optimally succumbs to confirmatory learning, leading him to favor the ex ante optimal action. We show that the principal prefers to mitigate this by hiring an agent who is ex ante more uncertain about which action is optimal. This is optimal even when the principal is herself biased towards some action: the benefit always outweighs the cost of a small misalignment. Optimally misaligned agent considers weakly more actions than an aligned agent. All results continue to hold when delegation is replaced by communication. |
| title | Optimally Biased Expertise |
| topic | Theoretical Economics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.13689 |