The Application of Linear Programming to Team Decision Problems

In a team decision problem there are two or more decision variables, and these different decisions can be made to depend upon different aspects of the environment, or information variables, the resulting payoff being a random variable. The choice of optimal rules for selecting information variables and for making decisions is the central problem of the economic theory of teams. This paper shows, by means of an example, how linear programming can be applied to obtain optimal team decision functions in the case in which the payoff to the team is a convex polyhedral function of the decision variables.