Essays in Information Economics

This thesis presents three essays in information economics. In the first essay "Leveraging Benchmarks via Information Design'', I study optimal information disclosure in settings with strategic complementarities. Agents decide whether to act or not, and the designer prefers a higher aggregate action. I assume the equilibrium agents play is selected by a natural reasoning process. Which equilibrium is selected depends on agents’ initial beliefs about the aggregate action, called the benchmark, which embeds payoff-irrelevant factors such as hype and reputation. I characterize designer-optimal information disclosure, and show that under it, a higher benchmark raises the fraction of agents receiving identical information. I also find that a higher benchmark always benefits the designer, but may not benefit agents. In the second essay "Organizational Culture, Hierarchies and Transparency'', I study how a principal incentivizes a team of symmetric workers to work on a project by offering them success-contingent bonuses. I make a similar assumption about the equilibrium played as the first chapter, where the benchmark now captures organizational culture and norms regarding work. I find that a minimum cost incentive scheme offers some workers the same, largest bonus, and the remaining workers smaller bonuses. A more hardworking culture, so workers reason others work harder, reduces the total bonuses paid, but increases the fraction of workers offered the same, largest bonus. It also leads to a shorter bonus hierarchy when bonuses must be public, and to workers receiving more information when the principal can control what workers learn about others’ bonuses. Finally, I show that whether mandating transparency, by requiring bonuses be public over private, leads to greater pay discrimination depends on culture. In the third essay "Allocating Scarce Information'', we study the problem of a utilitarian sender who has scarce information to convey to a group of receivers. Each receiver has a distinct, payoff relevant state, and sender is restricted in the total amount of information that can be revealed about each state. Under mild regularity conditions, we show that the payoff of each receiver is convex in the amount of information received. Thus, sender finds it optimal to fully target information to a single receiver. We then study three extensions in which interior allocations can be optimal.

Grantor dc:publisher

UNSW, Sydney

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• Teh, Christopher

• Information
• Economics
• Disclosure
• Complementarities
• Organizations
• Scarcity
• anzsrc-for: 38 ECONOMICS

Statement dc:rights

• embargoed access
• CC BY 4.0

Licence

• http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_f1cf
• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Language dc:language

en

Identifier

https://doi.org/10.26190/unsworks/31636

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:unsworks.library.unsw.edu.au:1959.4/105983