Communication Networks: Knowledge and Decisions
探讨组织内沟通如何影响绩效，指出成员通过交流私人信息可节省实验成本并促进协调，适合研究组织信息传递与决策的经济学者参考。
That communication pervades the everyday life of organizations is a statement of the obvious. How this widespread communication affects organization’s performance is less clear. Another truism about organizations is that their members are seldom fully knowledgeable of the exact state of the world in which they operate. To overcome this information uncertainty burden, organizations tend to devote a substantial amount of resources to retrieve information about their environment. Individual experimentation is a natural way to obtain superior information. When the nature and the consequences of the prevailing uncertainty is common to all organization members, a natural substitute for replications of individual experiments is to have agents communicate their private information among themselves. Communication is then a means to save on experimentation costs when they display diminishing returns. In another vein, shared information fosters coordination between individual agents, which is beneficial to the organization as a whole when coordinated actions lead to higher benefits for everyone. Altogether, when each organization member individually ascertains that both uncertainty and coordination are the main driving Networked INteractIoNs