Research

Dr Daniel Quigley, University of Oxford

"Divide and confer: Aggregating Information without Verification"
Tuesday, 16 March 2027. 16:00
Room 141 AB ASBS

Abstract

We study mechanisms for aggregating information divided across a large population of biased senders. Each sender privately observes an unconditionally independent signal about an unknown state, so no sender’s report can be verified against another’s. A receiver makes a binary accept/reject decision whose payoffs depend on the state. Even though cross-verification is impossible, we show the receiver can benefit from informational division. We introduce a novel incentive-compatibility-in-the-large approach that studies optimal design via the large-population limit. For fixed population size, optimal mechanisms are in general complex.
However, we show that in the limit they converge to a simple mechanism that depends only on the payoff from acceptance, and punishes excessive consensus in the direction of the common bias. These surplus burning punishments yield payoffs bounded away from the first best; the resulting inefficiency demonstrates how our concept of informational division is distinct from standard models of information in large populations.

Bio

Dan Quigley is an Associate Professor at the Department of Economics, University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Exeter college. His research is in microeconomic theory, focusing primarily on strategic communication, information and mechanism design.

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First published: 15 September 2026