Expert Information and Majority Decisions

Kawamura Kohei and Vlaseros Vasileios

No 2013-16, SIRE Discussion Papers from Scottish Institute for Research in Economics (SIRE)

Abstract: This paper studies dichotomous majority voting in common interest committees where each member receives not only a private signal but also a public signal observed by all of them. The public signal represents, e.g. expert information presented to an entire committee and its quality is higher than that of each individual private signal. We identify two informative symmetric strategy equilibria, namely i) the mixed strategy equilibrium where each member randomizes between following the private and public signals should they disagree; and ii) the pure strategy equilibrium where they follow the public signal for certain. The former outperforms the latter. The presence of the public signal precludes the equilibrium where every member follows their own signal, which is an equilibrium in the absence of the public signal. The mixed strategy equilibrium in the presence of the public signal outperforms the sincere voting equilibrium without the public signal, but the latter may be more efficient than the pure strategy equilibrium in the presence of the public signal. We suggest that whether expert information improves committee decision making depends on equilibrium selection.

Keywords: information aggregation; strategic voting; expert information (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-cta and nep-mic
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:edn:sirdps:446

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