Communicating with a Team of Experts

This paper combines theories of communication with theories of expertise and teams. Facing a team of experts, who must be given incentives to acquire information and to communicate it truthfully, how can and how should the leader communicate with the team members ? We characterize all the possibilities of using the information generated efficiently, and provide a complete welfare ranking of all equilibria. The welfare ranking is shown to depend one for one on the structure of the cost of information acquisition. We discuss applications to task assignment, and to noisy and costly communication.