Optimal Information Asymmetry
研究所有者与经理之间信息不对称程度如何内生决定，发现所有者偏好经理要么完全知情要么完全不知情，且经理信息越充分，最优激励强度越低，经理也不总想最大化信息优势。
At the heart of decentralization lies the notion that tasks are delegated by owners to managers who possess superior local information. The extent of this information asymmetry is often an endogenous construct, as it is influenced by the owner's choice of internal accounting systems and the manager's investment in acquiring local expertise. In this paper, we explore how varying levels of pre-contract, asymmetric information affect the owner-manager relationship. We provide three main sets of insights. First, we find that the owner's payoffs are initially decreasing, and strictly convex everywhere, in the quality of the manager's private information. The owner thus prefers to deal with either a perfectly informed or a perfectly uninformed manager, and we characterize conditions for either to be the preferred choice. Second, in contrast to recent work, we demonstrate that when information can be communicated internally, the optimal strength of managerial incentives unambiguously decreases as the manager becomes better informed. Third, we derive the surprising result that a self-interested manager does not always prefer to maximize his informational advantage. Our work has implications for the optimal design of organizations, and for internal accounting and control systems in particular.