BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Memento EPFL//
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:The Costly Wisdom of Inattentive Crowds
DTSTART:20231006T103000
DTEND:20231006T120000
DTSTAMP:20260428T132607Z
UID:7f5012d315902a5287e3cd67970a389af0e9e29a8542b1b70958c7cf
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Alexander Bloedel - UCLA\nIncentivizing the acquisition and ag
 gregation of information is a key task of the modern economy (e.g.\, finan
 cial markets). We study the design of optimal mechanisms for this task. A 
 population of rationally inattentive (RI) agents can flexibly learn about 
 a common state of nature\, subject to uniformly posterior separable (UPS) 
 information costs. A principal\, who aims to procure a given information s
 tructure from the agents at minimal cost\, can design general dynamic mech
 anisms with state-contingent payments. If the agents are risk-neutral\, pr
 ediction markets implement the first-best. If the agents are risk-averse\,
  no\nmechanism can approximate the first-best cost—not even those that h
 arness the “wisdom of the crowd” by employing a large number of “inf
 ormationally small” agents. This inefficiency derives from the combinati
 on of agents’ moral hazard and adverse selection. Our characterization o
 f incentive compatibility\, which exploits an equivalence between proper s
 coring rules and UPS information costs\, is tractable and portable to othe
 r design settings with RI agents (e.g.\, principal-expert and screening pr
 oblems).
LOCATION:UniL Campus\, Room Extra 126
STATUS:CONFIRMED
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR