On 28th November OxTalks will move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events' (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
There will be an OxTalks freeze beginning on Friday 14th November. This means you will need to publish any of your known events to OxTalks by then as there will be no facility to publish or edit events in that fortnight. During the freeze, all events will be migrated to the new Oxford Events site. It will still be possible to view events on OxTalks during this time.
If you have any questions, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
In many economic settings it is optimal to endow individuals with high abilities, rather than those with low abilities, with decision-making power. Yet there is rich empirical evidence showing that many of those in charge of decisions are not necessarily the most talented. We offer a novel rationale for why choosing a decision maker with low ability might be welfare-optimal. In a setting with two-sided information acquisition where the players disagree only when uninformed, we show that a high-ability principal optimally delegates authority to a low-ability agent because the latter not only exerts higher effort than under centralized decision-making, but also follows the principal’s advice when uninformed himself.
Link to paper: warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/shidir/paper_12_august.pdf
Please sign up for meetings here: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1G0KdCfEkG4LYBuDSCLxyGRSEULv3_smLEEQMofG4X5U/edit#gid=0
