An important task for organisations is establishing truthful communication between parties with differing interests. This task is made particularly challenging when the accuracy of the information is poorly observed or not at all. In these settings, incentive contracts based on the accuracy of information will not be very effective. This paper considers an alternative mechanism that does not require any signal of the accuracy of any information communicated to provide incentives for truthful communication. Rather, an expert sacrifices future participation in decision-making to influence the current period’s decision in favour of their preferred project. This mechanism captures a notion often described as ‘political capital’ whereby an individual is able to achieve their own preferred decision in the current period at the expense of being able to exert influence in future decisions (‘spending political capital’). When the first-best is not possible in this setting, I show that experts hold more influence than under the first-best and that, in a multi-agent extension, a finite team size is optimal. Together these results suggest that a small number of individuals hold excessive influence in organisations.

中文翻译：

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花费政治资本

组织的一项重要任务是在利益不同的各方之间建立真实的沟通。当信息的准确性没有得到很好的观察或根本没有时，这项任务变得特别具有挑战性。在这些情况下，基于信息准确性的激励合同不会很有效。本文考虑了一种替代机制，该机制不需要任何表明所传达信息的准确性的信号，即可为真实交流提供激励。相反，专家牺牲未来参与决策，以影响当前时期的决策，以支持他们喜欢的项目。这种机制抓住了一个通常被描述为“政治资本”的概念，即个人能够在当前时期实现自己的首选决策，但牺牲了对未来决策的影响力（“政治资本支出”）。当在这种情况下不可能做到最好时，我表明专家比在最好的情况下拥有更大的影响力，并且在多智能体扩展中，有限的团队规模是最佳的。这些结果共同表明，少数个人在组织中拥有过度的影响力。