Interagency Information Sharing with Resource Competition

Abstract

This paper presents a game-theoretic model to examine executive branch agencies’ incentives to share or withhold information given that resources are scarce. A political principal allocates support to two agencies based on their capabilities and also benefits when they provide information to each other. Based on agency outputs in one period, she can readjust her allocation in the next based on her beliefs about these capabilities. Since each agency prefers to receive the other’s information but also wants more support from the principal, cooperation in equilibrium is relatively easy in the last period, but more difficult to achieve in any preceding periods. The model informs discussions about how more information sharing might be achieved among agencies and provides empirical implications for the circumstances under which agencies are expected to have shared information.

Keywords: institutional corruption, bureaucracy, information sharing, cooperation, principal-agent model, game theory