Heterogeneity and Unanimity: Optimal Committees with Information Acquisition

Xin Zhao

No 52, Working Paper Series from Economics Discipline Group, UTS Business School, University of Technology, Sydney

Abstract: This paper studies how the composition and voting rule of a decision-making committee affect the incentives for its members to acquire information. Fixing the voting rule, a more polarized committee acquires more information. If a committee designer can choose the committee members and voting rule to maximize her payoff from the collective decision, she forms a heterogeneous committee adopting a unanimous rule, in which one member moderately biased toward one decision serves as the decisive voter, and all others are extremely opposed to the decisive voter and serve as information providers. The preference of the decisive voter is not perfectly aligned with that of the designer.

Keywords: Committee design; information acquisition; heterogeneity; voting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C79 D71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 54 pages
Date: 2018-10-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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