Events

Author:

• Wing SUEN
  University of Hong Kong

A model of delegation and expertise is presented, with self-interested and privately- informed decisionmakers and experts. Conflict of interests exists both between the decisionmakers and the experts, and between experts within a team. A balanced team of experts with extreme and opposite biases is shown to be acceptable to decisionmakers with a wide range of preferences, but the value of expertise from such a team is low. We also find that a decisionmaker wants to appoint experts who are less partisan than himself, in order to facilitate the pooling of information and thereby increase the quality of decisions by the expert team. Selective delegation, either by controlling the decisionmaking process or by conditioning the delegation decision on his own information, is another effective way for the decisionmaker to safeguard own interests while making use of expert information.