(Robust) Information Acquisition Design

Abstract

We study the design of information acquisition games-environments where a designer contracts their action on Sender's choice of experiment and the realized signals about some state. We develop a revelation-like principle for this setting and characterize the incentive properties of implementable allocations. We next turn to robust allocations-those that can be implemented regardless of the prior-and show that robustness is equivalent to experiment-neutrality of the mechanism. We conclude by considering two applications. First, for general good allocation problems, we show all efficient allocations are robust, even when agent preferences feature state-dependent outside options and allocation externalities. Second, we apply our model to school choice and uncover a novel informational justification for deferred acceptance when school preferences depend on students' unknown ability.