Abstract
Over 60% of global employment is informal, meaning that the majority of today's economy operates without formal contracts. In such informal working environments, decisions are often made based on outdated or incomplete information obtained through informal networks, which limits the ability of participants to make optimal decisions. In informal supply chains, members of the network also compete with each other, which disincentivizes the sharing of potentially valuable information. In this paper, we study the design of incentive-compatible information-sharing mechanisms for informal supply chains. We incentivize information-sharing by disclosing partial information to mitigate the effects of competition while allowing each member to gain valuable information. We construct a class of information disclosure policies that support sharing as a focal subgame perfect Nash equilibrium, and optimize over this class of policies for welfare and information gain. Our work is informed by an information-sharing platform we deployed in informal palm oil supply chains in rural Indonesia. This is joint work with Joann de Zegher.