Committee Search Design

Christina Luxen () and Tobias Rachidi ()

CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series from University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany

Abstract: This paper studies the design of committee search procedures. In each time period, a set of candidates of fixed size arrives, and committee members vote whether to accept a candidate out of this set or to continue costly search. We examine the implications of different sample sizes per period on acceptance standards and welfare, and we derive the welfare-maximizing number of candidates per period for small magnitudes of search costs. There is a trade-off between the expected value of a candidate conditional on stopping and the expected search costs. The resolution of this trade-off depends on the voting rule and the shape of the search cost function. In particular, we show that, for all cost functions and all qualified majority voting rules other than unanimity, welfare is increasing in the number of candidates per period if the magnitude of search costs is sufficiently small. This result stands in contrast to the classic finding for the single decision-maker case where the evaluation of multiple candidates per period does not improve welfare relative to reviewing one candidate at a time if there are no economies of scale in the simultaneous evaluation of multiple candidates.

Keywords: Committee Search; Sequential Search; Multiple Options (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 65
Date: 2021-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des and nep-mic
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.crctr224.de/research/discussion-papers/archive/dp203 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bon:boncrc:crctr224_2020_203v2

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series from University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany Kaiserstr. 1, 53113 Bonn , Germany.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CRC Office ().