Paper Detail

Monitoring Hierarchies in Knowledge Production

Shota Ichihashi, Fei Li, Dihan Zou

arxiv Score 7.2

Published 2026-09-09 · First seen 2026-09-10

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Abstract

We study peer monitoring design in knowledge production. A principal leads agents who work on different but related tasks. By working on their own tasks, agents acquire information that is useful for evaluating their peers' performance. We consider robust contracts under which effort by all agents is the unique rationalizable outcome. The optimal contract induces a hierarchy of monitoring authority: agents easier for the principal to monitor directly are assigned greater authority to evaluate other agents. Task diversity improves information value but weakens peer monitoring. This tension distorts optimal public task assignment toward the principal's core expertise. Confidential random assignment relaxes this distortion by decoupling information production from the perceived monitoring structure.

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BibTeX

@article{ichihashi2026monitoring,
  title = {Monitoring Hierarchies in Knowledge Production},
  author = {Shota Ichihashi and Fei Li and Dihan Zou},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {We study peer monitoring design in knowledge production. A principal leads agents who work on different but related tasks. By working on their own tasks, agents acquire information that is useful for evaluating their peers' performance. We consider robust contracts under which effort by all agents is the unique rationalizable outcome. The optimal contract induces a hierarchy of monitoring authority: agents easier for the principal to monitor directly are assigned greater authority to evaluate ot},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10499},
  keywords = {econ.TH},
  eprint = {2609.10499},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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