Francesco Squintani (University of Warwick) 14.12.2022

I study strategic information disclosure in networks. When agents' preferences are sufficiently diverse, the optimal network is the line in which the agents are ordered according to their ideologies. Such optimal networks obtain as Nash equilibria of a game in which each link requires sponsorship by both connected agents, and are the unique strongly pairwise stable networks. These results overturns classical results of non-strategic information transmission in networks, where the optimal and pairwise stable network is the star.
In political economy environments such as networks of policy-makers, interest groups, or judges, these results suggest positive and normative rationales for "horizontal" links between like-minded agents in political networks, as opposed to hierarchical networks, that have been shown to be optimal in organizations where agents' preferences are more closely aligned.