Information Acquisition and the Organization of Expertise in the Presence of Communication

A decision-maker has to elicit information from informed multiple experts about a policys value. The principal may prevent communication among agents. However, it may be in the principals interest to allow communication among them. We assume that communication lets some synergies among experts emerge but also opens the possibility of collusion among them. We study the optimal design of contracts focusing on the organization of the expertise. We show that, from principals point of view, communication dominates to no communication when the synergys e¤ects prevail over the collusion problem. Then, for the case of two experts is better to form a single team. However, when experts are more than two, under some circumstances, partial communication may dominate. Therefore, a set of several teams may be better than a single one