Information Aggregation in Standing and Ad Hoc Committees

Ali, S. Nageeb; Goeree, Jacob K.; Kartik, Navin; Palfrey, Thomas R.

doi:10.1257/aer.98.2.181

Cited by 52 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…A central question in the literature on formal models of voting has been the extent that majority voting leads to information aggregation when participants have private information but all would like to choose the same outcome as if they had complete information as posited by Condorcet (1785) . 1 Yet, in most of this work the possible abstention of voters is ignored. This makes sense for one of the principal applications of these models, that is, juries, since abstention is not allowed.…”

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Let the experts decide? Asymmetric information, abstention, and coordination in standing committees

Morton

Tyran

2011

Games and Economic Behavior

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We examine abstention when voters in standing committees are asymmetrically informed and there are multiple pure strategy equilibria-swing voter's curse (SVC) equilibria where voters with low quality information abstain and equilibria when all participants vote their information. When the asymmetry in information quality is large, we …nd that voting groups largely coordinate on the SVC equilibrium which is also Pareto Optimal. However, we …nd that when the asymmetry in information quality is not large and the Pareto Optimal equilibrium is for all to participate, signi…cant numbers of voters with low quality information abstain. Furthermore, we …nd that information asymmetry induces voters with low quality information to coordinate on a non-equilibrium outcome. This suggests that coordination on "letting the experts" decide is a likely voting norm that sometimes validates SVC equilibrium predictions but other times does not. Individuals make binary decisions by majority voting in many contexts from elections to legislatures to city councils to faculty department meetings to juries. A central question in the literature on formal models of voting has been the extent that majority voting leads to information aggregation when participants have private information but all would like to choose the same outcome as if they had complete information as posited by Condorcet (1785) . 1 Yet, in most of this work the possible abstention of voters is ignored. This makes sense for one of the principal applications of these models, that is, juries, since abstention is not allowed. But it does not make sense for many of the other voting situations. Abstention or simply not showing up for votes is allowed in most elections, legislatures, city councils, and faculty department meetings.Furthermore, one might argue that a norm in many of these voting situations is to delegate decisions to "the experts" or those individuals known to have expertise about a matter. For example, suppose an issue before a city council is whether to construct a new sewage plant.We can imagine that some of the city council members will have greater knowledge about the merits of the decision than others and that this will be known because they come from di¤erent business backgrounds or parts of the city or are on particular subcommittees. Alternatively, when a faculty department votes on whether to hire a new member, we can imagine that some members have greater knowledge of the individual's merits than others, and this heterogeneity in information will be known. We particularly expect this to be true in standing committees such as legislatures, city councils, and faculty departments since the same individuals repeatedly interact in voting situations over a series of sequential choices and are likely to know the overall qualities of each others'information.In a seminal set of papers, Pesendorfer (1996, 1999), hereafter FP, incorporate abstention into voting situations with asymmetric information and demonstrate that such delegation to experts can be...

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Let the experts decide? Asymmetric information, abstention, and coordination in standing committees

Morton

Tyran

2011

Games and Economic Behavior

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“…The experimental study on strategic voting was pioneered by Guarnaschelli, McKelvey, and Palfrey (2000) who tested the model of Austen-Smith and Banks (1996) and found that the subjects' behaviour was largely consistent with the theory. Focusing on unanimity rule, Ali, Goeree, Kartik, and Palfrey (2008) found that the findings by Guarnaschelli, McKelvey, and Palfrey (2000) are fairly robust to voting protocols such as the number of repetitions and timing of voting (simultaneous or sequential). The present paper focuses on majority rule, but examines the effect of public information on voting behaviour and outcomes.…”

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confidence: 95%

Expert information and majority decisions

Kawamura

Vlaseros

2017

Journal of Public Economics

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This paper shows theoretically and experimentally that hearing expert opinions can be a double-edged sword for decision making committees. We study a majoritarian voting game of common interest where committee members receive not only private information, but also expert information that is more accurate than private information and observed by all members. In theory, there are Bayesian Nash equilibria where the committee members' voting strategy incorporates both types of information and access to expert information enhances the efficiency of the majority decision. However, there is a class of potentially inefficient equilibria where a supermajority always follow expert information and the majority decision does not aggregate private information. In the laboratory, too many subjects voted according to expert information compared to the predictions from the efficient equilibria. We found a large efficiency loss due to the presence of expert information when the committee size was large. We suggest that it may be desirable for expert information to be revealed only to a subset of committee members.

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“…Seminal theoretical analysis of such environments by Fedderson and Pesendorfer (1996 examines the behavior of strategic voters who condition their beliefs on being pivotal. Experiments including Guarnaschelli et al (2000), Ali et al (2008), Battaglini et al (2008), Battaglini et al (2010), and Esponda and Vespa (forthcoming) find evidence that laboratory subjects sometimes behave strategically, though their behavior is not always explained well by symmetric Bayesian Nash equilibrium.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Cursed beliefs with common-value public goods

Cox

2015

Journal of Public Economics

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The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. AbstractI show how improper conditioning of beliefs can reduce contribution in public goods environments with interdependent values. I consider a simple model of a binary, excludable public good. In equilibrium, provision of the public good is good news about its value. Naïve players who condition expectations only on their private information contribute too little, despite the absence of free-riding incentives. In a laboratory experiment, contributions indeed fall short of the equilibrium prediction. Using modified games with different belief-conditioning effects, I verify that subjects fail to condition beliefs properly. However, improper belief conditioning cannot fully explain the results.

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Information Aggregation in Standing and Ad Hoc Committees

Cited by 52 publications

References 11 publications

Let the experts decide? Asymmetric information, abstention, and coordination in standing committees

Let the experts decide? Asymmetric information, abstention, and coordination in standing committees

Expert information and majority decisions

Cursed beliefs with common-value public goods

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