The Price of Competitive Information Disclosure
This addresses a foundational problem in game theory and mechanism design for decision-making scenarios with strategic agents, offering theoretical insights into societal outcomes.
The paper tackles the problem of whether strategic information disclosure by multiple agents in competitive Bayesian persuasion leads to good societal outcomes, showing that the price of anarchy is at most a constant for independent quality distributions, providing the first theoretical guarantee on inefficiency limits.
In many decision-making scenarios, individuals strategically choose what information to disclose to optimize their own outcomes. It is unclear whether such strategic information disclosure can lead to good societal outcomes. To address this question, we consider a competitive Bayesian persuasion model in which multiple agents selectively disclose information about their qualities to a principal, who aims to choose the candidates with the highest qualities. Using the price-of-anarchy framework, we quantify the inefficiency of such strategic disclosure. We show that the price of anarchy is at most a constant when the agents have independent quality distributions, even if their utility functions are heterogeneous. This result provides the first theoretical guarantee on the limits of inefficiency in Bayesian persuasion with competitive information disclosure.