Corruption in Committees: An Experimental Study of Information Aggregation through Voting

Rebecca Morton and Jean-Robert Tyran

No 14-18, Discussion Papers from University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics

Abstract: We investigate experimentally the effects of corrupt experts on information aggregation in committees. We find that non-experts are significantly less likely to delegate through abstention when there is a probability that experts are corrupt. Such decreased abstention, when the probability of corrupt experts is low, actually increases information efficiency in committee decision-making. However, if the probability of corrupt experts is large, the effect is not sufficient to offset the mechanical effect of decreased information efficiency due to corrupt experts. Our results demonstrate that the norm of “letting the expert decide” in committee voting is influenced by the probability of corrupt experts, and that influence can have, to a limited extent, a positive effect on information efficiency.

Keywords: Information aggregation; Voting; Asymmetric information; Swing voter's curse (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D71 D72 D81 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2014-09-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-cta, nep-exp and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.econ.ku.dk/english/research/publications/wp/dp_2014/1418.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Corruption in Committees: An Experimental Study of Information Aggregation through Voting (2015)
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:kud:kuiedp:1418

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics Oester Farimagsgade 5, Building 26, DK-1353 Copenhagen K., Denmark. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Thomas Hoffmann ().