For what I think is the first time, a paper in a top econ journal (the RAND Journal) has appeared on the front page of Digg (via an article in ScienceDaily).

The paper is by Isabelle Brocas and Juan Carrillo and is titled “Influence Through Ignorance”. I’d like to explain what it’s about, but I found the article in ScienceDaily was pretty confusing. The basic idea seems to be that you can gain influence over people by strategically limiting the flow of information, not just to them but to yourself as well. I guess some sort of strategic commitment to self-ignorance gives you some bargaining power or something. This is somewhat contrary to the standard model of asymmetric information where the party with the most information usually comes off best.

The original paper (pdf) is available, but the server it’s on seems to be down at the moment thanks to the Digg effect.