How Transparency Kills Information Aggregation: Theory and Experiment

Sebastian Fehrler and Niall Hughes

No 9027, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We investigate the potential of transparency to influence committee decision-making. We present a model in which career concerned committee members receive private information of different type-dependent accuracy, deliberate and vote. We study three levels of transparency under which career concerns are predicted to affect behavior differently, and test the model's key predictions in a laboratory experiment. The model's predictions are largely borne out – transparency negatively affects information aggregation at the deliberation and voting stages, leading to sharply different committee error rates than under secrecy. This occurs despite subjects revealing more information under transparency than theory predicts.

Keywords: committee decision-making; deliberation; transparency; career concerns; information aggregation; experiments; voting; strategic communication (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D71 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 53 pages
Date: 2015-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-cta, nep-exp and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published - published in: American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 2018, 10, 181-209

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp9027.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: How Transparency Kills Information Aggregation: Theory and Experiment (2018)
Working Paper: How Transparency Kills Information Aggregation: theory and Experiment (2015)
Working Paper: How Transparency Kills Information Aggregation: Theory and Experiment (2015)
Working Paper: How Transparency Kills Information Aggregation: Theory and Experiment (2015)
Working Paper: How Transparency Kills Information Aggregation: Theory and Experiment (2015)
Working Paper: How Transparency Kills Information Aggregation: Theory and Experiment (2014)
Working Paper: How Transparency Kills Information Aggregation (And Why That May Be A Good Thing) (2014)
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:iza:izadps:dp9027

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().