Reputation and Information Aggregation

We analyze how reputation concerns of a partially informed decision-maker affect her ability to extract information from reputation-concerned advisors. Too high decision-maker's reputation concerns destroy her incentives to seek advice. However, when such concerns are low, she is tempted to solicit advice regardless of her private information, which can undermine advisors' truth-telling incentives. The optimal strength of the decision-maker's reputation concerns maximizes advice-seeking while preserving advisors' truth-telling. Prior uncertainty about the state of nature calls for a more reputation-concerned decision-maker. Higher expected competence of the advisors may worsen information aggregation, unless the decision-maker's reputation concerns are properly adjusted