Should Antitrust Authorities Disclose Expert Performance?

Antitrust authorities increasingly rely on independent external economists and technical experts in merger, cartel, and conduct investigations. Yet because outcome-contingent compensation would compromise, or at least appear to compromise, the independence of expert advice, experts hired by the authority are rarely rewarded on the basis of enforcement outcomes. This creates incentive distortions. We ask whether disclosing expert performance to future employers alleviates this problem. In a Gaussian career-concerns model with endogenous information acquisition, disclosure improves labor-market inference about ability, strengthens effort incentives, reduces the marginal cost of evidence, and leads the authority to make better-informed decisions. Disclosure is optimal for the authority if and only if its fixed cost is below a positive threshold that increases with higher average ability, lower talent dispersion, greater task uncertainty, and noisier priors. We further show that a welfare-minded planner may be less inclined to disclose than the authority; that even noisy evaluations strengthen incentives; that transparency attracts stronger experts when entry is endogenous; and that in multi-expert teams individual attribution is essential – i.e., team-level disclosure only partially mitigates moral hazard.