Multi-Sender Disclosure with Costs

2026-01-15

AI Summary

This study investigates strategic voluntary disclosure behavior among multiple senders when disclosure or concealment entails costs, and examines its implications for decision-makers. Within a game-theoretic and information economics framework, the authors develop a model of strategic interaction among senders under asymmetric information. The analysis reveals that disclosure costs and concealment costs exert opposing effects on information revelation: the former induces strategic substitutability, suppressing disclosure, while the latter generates strategic complementarity, encouraging it. Moreover, increasing the number of senders does not necessarily enhance the decision-maker’s welfare and may even be detrimental. This finding challenges the intuitive notion that more information sources are inherently better, underscoring the critical role of cost structures in information aggregation.

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Imperfect Information
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Decision/Utility Theory

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness, privacy, and diversity in economic environments
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Content-based information diffusion

Abstract

We study voluntary disclosure with multiple biased senders who may bear costs for disclosing or concealing their private information. Under relevant assumptions, disclosures are strategic substitutes under a disclosure cost but complements under a concealment cost. Additional senders thus impede any sender's disclosure under a disclosure cost but promote it under a concealment cost. In the former case, a decision maker can be harmed by additional senders, even when senders have opposing interests. The effects under both kinds of message costs turn on how a sender, when concealing his information, expects others'messages to systematically sway the decision maker's belief.

Problem

• voluntary disclosure
• multiple senders
• disclosure cost
• concealment cost
• strategic information transmission

Innovation

• voluntary disclosure
• multiple senders
• disclosure cost
• concealment cost
• strategic substitutes and complements