Information Agreements

We analyze a model where several agents bargain over an information structure. The main application is a joint campaign by opposition politicians against an incumbent. Disagreement leads to an exogenous benchmark that may involve full or no information disclosure. We characterize the existence of an agreement that benefits all agents. Our main result is that an agreement exists if, for any coalition of agents of a fixed size, there is a receiver’s belief that makes members better off, non-members worse off, and the sum of all payoffs higher than the benchmark. We then describe environments where symmetric and efficient agreements imply high but not necessarily complete transparency. While the literature emphasizes competition as a source of transparency, our results suggest that transparency can also be achieved through collusion among symmetric agents.

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