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，个体策略性地选择披露哪些信息以优化自身结果。尚不清楚这种策略性信息披露是否能够带来良好的社会结果。为解决这一问题，我们考虑一个竞争性贝叶斯说服模型，其中多个主体策略性地向主理人披露自身质量信息，主理人旨在选择质量最高的候选者。我们采用无政府价格框架量化了这种策略性披露的低效率。研究表明，当主体质量分布相互独立时，即使其效用函数具有异质性，无政府价格仍不超过一个常数。该结果为竞争性信息披露下的贝叶斯说服中低效率的极限提供了首个理论保证。