Political Expertise – Krosnick

The Nature of Expertise – Robert Glaser

  •   AI + Expertise and Expert Systems – Luc Steels
    • Inference Structures – Heuristics, screening for necessary information
    • deep vs surface knowledge – surface knowledge and the advantage of screening but the disadvantage of brittleness and weak explanation and unclear boundaries
    • problem solving methods – knowledge-use-level characterization
    • generic tasks

A Model of Expertise – Vijay Krishna, John Morgan

  • If experts have problems
    • Experts are interested and have objectives
    • Experts are prevalent and often conflicting
  • Then how does one choose a cabinet?
    • Incongruent incentives always leads to a withholding of information on the part of the experts
    • Advice does not have any direct economic effect; at best it only influences economically relevant decisions. Thus experts’ advice has the nature of cheap talk
  • Crawford & Sobel (1982) and strategic information transmission
  • Ottaviani and Sorensen (1997) – “being on the mark.”
    • experts may well neglect their own information in order to appear correct
  • Bannerjee & Somanthan (1997) Friedman (1998) – continuum of potential experts

The art of conversation: eliciting information from experts – Vijay Krishna

Two kinds of games

  • “Cheap talk games” in which communication is costless and non binding;
  • and “persuasion games,” in which information becomes certifiable
  • We can find these in lobbying, delegation, buyer-seller relationships, oligopolies

Cheap Talk – Joseph Farrell; Matthew Rabin

Cheap Talk Reputation and Coordination of Differentiated Experts – In-Uck Park

  • Fully Honest advice may not be sustained if the profitability of service provision varies widely across problems
  • As the number of experts increases due to a higher degree of specialization, the maximum equilibrium honesty level deteriorates
  • Nonetheless, the equilibiria that pass a certain credibilitiy check on their punishment phases, implement the same (unique) honesty level regardless of the number of experts
    • the customer can extract this honesty level by appointing a panel of only one or two (but no more) experts and “trusting” them all the time.
  • ‘ Cheap Talk Referrals of Differentiated Experts in Repeated Relationship’, RAND Journal of Economics, 36, 391-411 (2005)