Experiments in Information Sharing

accuracy Nathan Berg*, Chunyu Chen** and Murat Kantarcioglu*** Introduction Those who study organizational failure commonly diagnose the root cause as breakdowns in information sharing. A vivid example is the failure of US intelligence agencies to share information that, in retrospect, might have prevented 9/11. This interpretation holds that the FBI and CIA could have shared important leads to prevent the attacks but instead responded to what those agencies perceived to be tournament incentives under which only one agency within the broader security and threat-prevention apparatus of the US government could expect to be rewarded (financially and otherwise) for stopping an impending threat. In this view, misaligned incentives led to "turf issues" (i.e., parochialism reflecting incompatible objectives between subsidiary and parent organizations) which caused the quantity and quality of information sharing to fall significantly short of the levels necessary for achieving the parent organization's primary objective. Insufficient information sharing as a root cause of failure to prevent the attacks featured prominently in rationales given by those who then pushed for the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2002 and passage of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA) of 2004. The dramatic reorganization of 22 agencies into the DHS and