EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Individual and Collective Information Acquisition: An Experimental Study

Pëllumb Reshidi, Alessandro Lizzeri, Leeat Yariv, Jimmy Chan and Wing Suen

No 9468, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Many committees—juries, political task forces, etc.—spend time gathering costly information before reaching a decision. We report results from lab experiments focused on such information-collection processes. We consider decisions governed by individuals and groups and compare how voting rules affect outcomes. We also contrast static information collection, as in classical hypothesis testing, with dynamic collection, as in sequential hypothesis testing. Several insights emerge. Static information collection is excessive, and sequential information collection is non-stationary, producing declining decision accuracies over time. Furthermore, groups using majority rule yield especially hasty and inaccurate decisions. Nonetheless, sequential information collection is welfare enhancing relative to static collection, particularly when unanimous rules are used.

Keywords: information acquisition; collective choice; experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 C92 D72 D83 D87 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cdm and nep-exp
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp9468.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Individual and Collective Information Acquisition: An Experimental Study (2024) Downloads
Working Paper: Individual and Collective Information Acquisition: An Experimental Study (2021) Downloads
Working Paper: Individual and Collective Information Acquisition: An Experimental Study (2021) Downloads
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:ces:ceswps:_9468

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe (wohlrabe@ifo.de).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_9468