  The hierarchical nature of corporate information processing is a topic of
great interest in economic and management literature. Firms are characterised
by a need to make complex decisions, often aggregating partial and uncertain
information, which greatly exceeds the attention capacity of constituent
individuals. However, the efficient transmission of these signals is still not
fully understood. Recently, the information bottleneck principle has emerged as
a powerful tool for understanding the transmission of relevant information
through intermediate levels in a hierarchical structure. In this paper we note
that the information bottleneck principle may similarly be applied directly to
corporate hierarchies. In doing so we provide a bridge between organisation
theory and that of rapidly expanding work in deep neural networks (DNNs),
including the use of skip connections as a means of more efficient transmission
of information in hierarchical organisations.
