Essays in Microeconomic Theory

Abstract

This dissertation is built up of four essays in Microeconomic Theory. In these essays, I analyze strategic disclosure of information to a committee and strategic communication of information within an organization. All four Chapters deal with the overall question how transmitted information influences the decisions of individuals in the presence of an underlying conflict of interest. The Chapters differ in the credibility of the transmitted information. While Chapters 1 and 2 allow the person who discloses information (the sender) to commit to a policy that specifies in which event which information is disclosed, in Chapters 3 and 4 the sender is missing this power to commit to a predefined communication scheme. The absence of this commitment power is crucial when it comes to how the receiving individuals update their beliefs and act afterwards. <br /> The first Chapter of this thesis analyzes how an interested party can persuade an informed committee to vote for her preferred outcome by strategically disclosing decision relevant information. Chapter 2 is an extension of Chapter 1 and deals with the question how results change when the interested party is clueless in the sense that she no longer has access to superior information and is thus reliant on the information the committee possesses. Chapter 3 deals with the question whether an uninformed principal should delegate a decision to her better informed agent or whether the principal should consult the agent and keep the decision rights. In Chapter 4, I analyze whether a centralized organization form should be chosen over a decentralized form when important information is distributed across divisions which have different interests than the overall organization.