Optimal size of majoritarian committees under persuasion

Saptarshi Ghosh, Peter Postl and Jaideep Roy
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Saptarshi Ghosh: Shiv Nadar University
Peter Postl: University of Bath

No 43/15, Department of Economics Working Papers from University of Bath, Department of Economics

Abstract: We analyze the ‘optimal’ size of non-deliberating majoritarian committees with no conflict of interest among its members when committees can be persuaded by a biased and informed expert. We find that when this bias is small, the optimal size is one; when it is intermediate, the optimal size increases monotonically in the precision of members’ private information; when it is large this relation is non-monotonic. However the optimal committee-size never exceeds five. We also show that biased persuasion typically hurts a larger committee more severely. These results provide important implications on issues like universal enfranchisement, role of expert commentary in a democracy or size of governing boards in firms.

Date: 2017-07-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eid:wpaper:58147

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