Information acquisition, referral, and organization

Information acquisition, referral, and organization

Each of two experts may provide a service to a client. Experts’ cost comparative advantage depends on an unknown state, but an expert may exert effort to get a private signal about it. In a market, an expert may refer the client to the other for a fee. In equilibrium, only one expert exerts effort and refers, and the equilibrium allocation is inefficient. Referral efficiency can be restored whe...

Motivating Information Acquisition through Organization Design

We investigate how monetary incentives and the allocation of decision rights inside an organizational hierarchy can be used together to motivate information acquisition, support accurate communication and guide decision-making. We analyze the di¤erences between a centralized decision-making structure, where local divisions acquire information and communicate it to the headquarters that makes th...

Information Technology and Work Organization Information Technology and Work Organization

Corporate Memory: A framework for supporting tools for acquisition, organization and maintenance of information and knowledge

In this paper we describe corporate memory which can support multiple knowledge acquisition, organization and maintenance tools. Memory holds and manages documents and related information and knowledge processed and created by such tools. Tools can work with several types of data such as documents, data in relational database and semantic data. Such diversity of information is needed due to dif...

Information acquisition and entry

This paper provides a framework for explicitly modeling the information gathering activities of potential entrants and analyzes how entry behavior is affected by these activities. We assume that information is acquired secretly and that firms face uncertainty about more than one variable. When costs of information gathering are small, entry decisions are as if firms had perfect information so t...