Private disclosure with multiple agents

Abstract

This study examines a mechanism design problem where the principal can affect the agents' knowledge of a payoff-relevant state, namely, the principal designs and commits to an information disclosure policy that generates agent-specific private signals, while the principal directly observes neither the state nor the signal profile. We solve this problem by constructing a novel class of disclosure policies that exhibit individually uninformative, aggregately revealing, and immune to unilateral misreporting properties and show that the principal achieves the same payoff as if she could directly observe the state and implement state-contingent allocation rules. Moreover, we prove that our disclosure policy is robust to information-sharing among a certain number of agents and remains optimal in various settings.