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Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences, Management Science, 5(45), p. 659-669, 1999

DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.45.5.659

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Information Aggregation and Communication in Organizations

Journal article published in 1999 by Haim Mendelson, Ravindran R. Pillai, Lee K. Jones, Philippe Jehiel
This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

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Abstract

Operating units must communicate their private information regarding decisions to be taken in organizations. This paper characterizes the optimal communication structures assuming that (i) a decision maker is fired whenever he makes a decision that proves wrong ex post relative to the status quo; and (ii) direct communication in a group of kunits may result in the loss of messages with a probability that solely depends on the group size. Several levels of partitioning with direct communication taking place in each group are required. It is shown that there exists a group size that allows communication technology to be exploited optimally: The optimal communication structure is such that it is essentially composed of groups of this size only at every level of partitioning.