Score contribution per author:
α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count
Abstract We study a one-shot information aggregation problem in which agents have to provide effort in order to understand the information they are supposed to process. Agents have a common interest in reaching a good decision but suffer from an individual cost of providing effort. Showing that any problem which is incentive compatible for a single information processor is incentive compatible for a decentralized organization, but not vice versa, we derive a new rationale for decentralized information processing. For a class of problems, the fastest organization - the reduced tree proposed by Radner (1993) - yields also the best incentives for information processing.