@article{dd2cdaee5ede43a99643a5d6548fff8b,
title = "Crime, Intimidation, and Whistleblowing: A Theory of Inference from Unverifiable Reports",
abstract = "We consider a game between a principal, an agent, and a monitor in which the principal would like to rely on messages by the monitor (the potential whistleblower) to target intervention against a misbehaving agent. The difficulty is that the agent can credibly threaten to retaliate against the monitor in the event of an intervention. In this setting, intervention policies that are responsive to the monitor's message provide informative signals to the agent, which can be used to target threats efficiently. Principals that are too responsive to information shut down communication channels. Successful intervention policies must therefore garble the information provided by monitors and cannot be fully responsive. We show that policy evaluation on the basis of non-verifiable whistleblower messages is feasible under arbitrary incomplete information provided policy design takes into account that messages are endogenous.",
keywords = "C72, Crime, D23, D73, D86, Inference, Intimidation, Plausible deniability, Policy evaluation, Structural experiment design, Whistleblowing",
author = "Sylvain Chassang and Miquel, {Gerard Padr{\'o} I.}",
note = "Funding Information: Acknowledgments. We are grateful to Johannes H{\"o}rner for a very helpful discussion. We are indebted to Nageeb Ali, Abhijit Banerjee, Michael Callen, Yeon Koo Che, Hans Christensen, Ray Fisman, Matt Gentzkow, Bob Gibbons, Navin Kartik, David Martimort, Marco Ottaviani, Andrea Prat, Jesse Shapiro, as well as seminar audiences at the 2013 Winter Meeting of the Econometric Society, the 2015 Minnesota-Chicago Accounting Theory Conference, Berkeley, Bocconi, Columbia, Essex, Hebrew University, the Institute for Advanced Study, MIT, MIT Sloan, the Nemmers Prize Conference, Norwegian Business School, NYU, NYU IO day, the Paris School of Economics, Pompeu Fabra, ThReD, Yale, the University of Chicago, UCSD, and the UCSD workshop on Cellular Technology, Security and Governance for helpful conversations. Chassang gratefully acknowledges the hospitality of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, as well as support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation under grant SES-1156154. Padr{\'o} i Miquel acknowledges financial support from the European Union{\textquoteright}s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / ERC Starting Grant Agreement no. 283837. Funding Information: We are grateful to Johannes H?rner for a very helpful discussion. We are indebted to Nageeb Ali, Abhijit Banerjee, Michael Callen, Yeon Koo Che, Hans Christensen, Ray Fisman, Matt Gentzkow, Bob Gibbons, Navin Kartik, David Martimort, Marco Ottaviani, Andrea Prat, Jesse Shapiro, as well as seminar audiences at the 2013 Winter Meeting of the Econometric Society, the 2015 Minnesota-Chicago Accounting Theory Conference, Berkeley, Bocconi, Columbia, Essex, Hebrew University, the Institute for Advanced Study, MIT, MIT Sloan, the Nemmers Prize Conference, Norwegian Business School, NYU, NYU IO day, the Paris School of Economics, Pompeu Fabra, ThReD, Yale, the University of Chicago, UCSD, and the UCSD workshop on Cellular Technology, Security and Governance for helpful conversations. Chassang gratefully acknowledges the hospitality of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, as well as support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation under grant SES-1156154. Padro i Miquel acknowledges financial support from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013)/ERC Starting Grant Agreement no. 283837. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2018 The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Review of Economic Studies Limited.",
year = "2019",
month = nov,
day = "1",
doi = "10.1093/restud/rdy075",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "86",
pages = "2530--2553",
journal = "Review of Economic Studies",
issn = "0034-6527",
publisher = "Oxford University Press",
number = "6",
}