On Information Design with Spillovers

61 Pages Posted: 8 Mar 2020 Last revised: 27 Nov 2023

See all articles by Ozan Candogan

Ozan Candogan

University of Chicago - Booth School of Business

Yifan Guo

University of Science and Technology of China (USTC)

Haifeng Xu

The University of Chicago

Date Written: February 1, 2020

Abstract

An information designer has access to a set of experiments and decides which of these to assign to each of the agents in a directed network. The network encodes informational spillovers: an agent has access to the experiments assigned to him, as well as to others’ experiments that might spill over to him. We study optimal information design (through the assignment of experiments) under a variety of considerations ranging from the mode of spillovers (local vs. global) to lossy information transmission. Our results indicate that in the global spillover case, when each agent follows at most one other agent (i.e., each node has in-degree at most one), the optimal information structure can be obtained in a tractable way. However, the complexity of the problem exhibits a phase transition when some agents follow more than one agent: it becomes NP-hard even when some agents follow two agents, regardless of how simple the communication technology is (characterized in terms of the number of communication thresholds). The tractability under local spillovers has quite a different nature and contrasts with the global spillover case. In this case, we show that the problem is tractable so long as each agent does not follow many agents and the communication technology is simple. However, it becomes intractable with any deviation from these two factors. Finally, we study the implications of our framework for information design in supply chains with spillovers, where a retailer reveals demand-related information to influence upstream investment decisions. We show that by exploiting the special structure of the payoffs in this problem, tractable algorithms can be obtained in even richer settings. We also shed light on how different types of spillovers impact the retailer’s payoff.

Keywords: Information design, information spillovers, communication network, tree decomposition

Suggested Citation

Candogan, Ozan and Guo, Yifan and Xu, Haifeng, On Information Design with Spillovers (February 1, 2020). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3537289 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3537289

Ozan Candogan (Contact Author)

University of Chicago - Booth School of Business ( email )

5807 S. Woodlawn Avenue
Chicago, IL 60637
United States

HOME PAGE: http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/ozan.candogan/

Yifan Guo

University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) ( email )

96, Jinzhai Road
Hefei, Anhui 230026
China

Haifeng Xu

The University of Chicago ( email )

Chicago
United States

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