Voting to Persuade

Tsz-Ning Wong (), Lily Ling Yang () and Xin Zhao ()

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

Abstract: We consider a model of collective persuasion, in which members of an advisory committee receive private continuous signals and then vote on a policy change. A decision maker then decides whether to adopt the change upon observing each vote. Information transmission between the committee and the decision maker is possible if and only if there exists an infor- mative equilibrium with the unanimity rule. When the decision maker is more conservative, a higher level of consensus is needed to persuade her to abandon the status quo in equilib- rium. Our result thus provide a rationale for the use of the unanimity rule, despite its poor performance in information aggregation (Feddersen and Pesendorfer 1998). Furthermore, the continuous-signal model considered in this paper produces results that contrast the discrete-signal model considered in the literature (Battaglini 2017; Gradwohl and Feddersen 2018) and we discuss how the results depend on the coarseness of the signal structure.

Keywords: Advisory committee; Persuasion; Voting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 D72 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49
Date: 2022-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-mic and nep-pol
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