Information Acquisition, Decision Making, and Implementation in Organizations

Abstract

We study the value of divergence in values and preferences in organizations by combining three stages of a decision process—ex ante information acquisition, interim project choice, and ex post project execution—into a tractable model. A key insight is that our unified model provides predictions different from models without the execution decision stage. We consider an organization that consists of a decision maker who selects a project and an implementer who acquires costly information before project choice and executes the selected project. They have intrinsic and possibly divergent preferences over projects. We show that, although the implementer’s dual role generates a disadvantage of designing conflicts in terms of the implementation motivation, it simultaneously boosts the implementer’s motivation for information acquisition to influence the decision maker’s project choice more under divergent preferences. Our results provide managerial insights that designing conflicts is beneficial only in environments where additional information is sufficiently precise and must be accompanied by a manager who is balanced and incorporating feedback. This paper was accepted by Joshua Gans, business strategy. Funding: This work was financially supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI [Grants 25245031 and 18H03640] toH. Itoh and the JSPS Fellows [Grant 26.5608] to K.Morita. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4373 .