Ginzburgs, B; (2016) Essays on Information and Political Economy. Doctoral thesis , UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis examines the role of information acquisition and information revelation in political and social interactions. Chapter 2 looks at a committee that needs to make a collective decision which gives every member a private state-dependent payoff. The committee can vote to learn the state at no cost. The chapter finds that the committee chooses to be uninformed whenever preferences of its members are sufficiently heterogeneous. Furthermore, members whose preferred state is revealed slower are better off. Chapter 3 analyses voting by a heterogeneous group in presence of private information. Unlike much of the literature, which looks at groups with relatively similar preferences and finds that voters generally do not vote according to their signals, Chapter 3 shows that sincere voting is an equilibrium strategy of all voters when preferences are sufficiently diverse. Chapter 4 looks at a government who can decide which news to censor and which news to reveal to a heterogeneous population of citizens. It turns out that stricter censorship is optimal when citizens are, overall, more supportive of the government. Finally, Chapter 5 looks at costly information disclosure by contestants competing for a prize. The chapter shows that an increase in competition leads to more information disclosure if and only if the cost of disclosure is high. Furthermore, when information is revealed with some noise, contestants are more likely to reveal it.

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