A principal hires an agent to both gather information about a project's costs and implement it. The agent's information-gathering effort and what he learns are his private information. I allow the agent to be overconfident in the sense that he underestimates his expected cost of implementation and study the effects this overconfidence has on the efficiency of information acquisition and implementation. Overconfidence makes the agent more willing to accept a given contract but may dampen his incentive to gather information. As a result, information may not be gathered in equilibrium due solely to the agent's overconfidence, which causes inefficiencies in the project's implementation. When the agent's information-gathering cost is low enough, the principal's payoff is nonmonotonic in the degree of overconfidence, increasing for both low and high levels of overconfidence, but decreasing for intermediate levels.

中文翻译：

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过度自信的代理人收集的信息

委托人聘请代理人收集有关项目成本的信息并实施。代理收集信息的努力和他学到的都是他的私人信息。我允许代理人过分自信，因为他低估了他的预期实施成本，并研究了这种过度自信对信息获取和实施效率的影响。过度自信使代理人更愿意接受给定的合同，但可能会抑制他收集信息的动机。因此，可能仅由于代理人的过度自信而无法均衡地收集信息，这会导致项目实施效率低下。当代理人的信息收集成本足够低时，委托人的收益在过度自信的程度上是非单调的，