In many decision-making scenarios, individuals strategically choose what information to disclose to optimize their own outcomes. It is unclear whether such strategic information disclosure can lead to good societal outcomes. To address this question, we consider a competitive Bayesian persuasion model in which multiple agents selectively disclose information about their qualities to a principal, who aims to choose the candidates with the highest qualities. Using the price-of-anarchy framework, we quantify the inefficiency of such strategic disclosure. We show that the price of anarchy is at most a constant when the agents have independent quality distributions, even if their utility functions are heterogeneous. This result provides the first theoretical guarantee on the limits of inefficiency in Bayesian persuasion with competitive information disclosure.

翻译：在许多决策场景中，个体为优化自身结果而策略性地选择披露何种信息。目前尚不清楚此类策略性信息披露能否带来良好的社会结果。为探究此问题，我们构建了一个竞争性贝叶斯劝说模型，其中多个代理人向委托人选择性披露自身质量信息，而委托人旨在选择具有最高质量的候选人。通过采用无政府价格分析框架，我们量化了此类策略性披露的低效性。研究表明，当代理人具有独立的质量分布时，即使其效用函数存在异质性，无政府价格的上界仍为常数。该结果为竞争性信息披露场景下贝叶斯劝说效率损失的理论界限提供了首个理论保证。