Analysis of Prerequisite for Experts Acquiring and Reporting Informatively

This paper is concerned with the problem of strategic information acquisition and information transmission. In our model, a decision maker delegates multiple experts to acquire information concerning a binary decision under uncertainty. The decision maker and experts have different utility functions with respect to the decision problem, which are their private information. We derive the optimal number of experts which the decision maker should delegate providing that all experts acquire information and report sincerely. Then we identify the prerequisite for all experts gathering and reporting informatively. We show that every expert´s strategy for information acquisition and transmission when he is one of multiple information senders is generally different from that when he is the only one. And every expert´s pivotal probability for the final decision, which is evaluated based on the probability distribution of the decision maker´s threshold of doubt, is not equal to his pivotal probability under the majoritarian decision rule with a quota being the expected threshold of doubt of the decision maker.