Disagreement and information acquisition with multiple experts

I examine a persuasion game between a decision maker and two advisers. The decision-making is centralized, and each adviser exerts costly effort to acquire information, which is publicly observed if generated. Crucially, the players have the same preferences but differing priors. The latter assumption implies that even if the players observe the same information, their preferred actions differ, i.e., they have differences of opinion about the optimal action. I show that each advisor has free-riding incentives, so that their effort choices are strategic substitutes. As a result, an advisor's effort choice is increasing in the degree of his own differences of opinion with the decision maker, but it is decreasing in that of the other advisor. This results in a trade-off for the decision maker when choosing advisers. By increasing her differences of opinion with an adviser, the decision maker elicits higher effort from one advisor but lower effort from the other one. Nevertheless, I show that the decision maker is better off by choosing two advisers with extreme differences of opinion instead of choosing two like-minded advisers.