We consider the problem of a decision-maker who seeks for advice from several experts. The experts have reputation concerns which generate incentives to herd on the prior belief about the state of the world. We address the following question: Should the experts be allowed to exchange their information before providing advice (“collective expertise”) or not (“independent expertise”)? We show that collective expertise is more informative than independent expertise under low prior uncertainty about the state and less informative otherwise. We also argue that collective expertise gains advantage as the number of experts grows.

中文翻译：

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独立与集体专业知识

我们考虑决策者寻求多位专家建议的问题。专家们对声誉的担忧会促使他们追随对世界状况的先前信念。我们解决以下问题：是否应该允许专家在提供建议之前交换信息（“集体专业知识”）或不允许（“独立专业知识”）？我们表明，在国家先验不确定性较低的情况下，集体专业知识比独立专业知识提供的信息更多，而在其他情况下，集体专业知识的信息量则较少。我们还认为，随着专家数量的增加，集体专业知识会获得优势。