Optimal Two Stage Committee Voting Rules

Ian Ayres (), Colin Rowat () and Nasser Zakariya

No 04-23RR, Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of Birmingham

Abstract: We study option management by committee. Analysis is illustrated by tenure decisions. Our innovations are two-fold: we treat the committee's problem as one of social choice, not information aggregation; and we endogenise the outside option: rejecting a candidate at either the probationary or tenure stage return the committee to a candidate pool. For committees with N members, we find: (1) a candidate's fate depends only on the behaviour of two `weather-vane' committee members - generalised median voters; (2) en- thusiastic assessments by one of these weather-vanes may harm a candidate's chances by increasing others' thresholds for hiring him; and (3) sunk time costs may lead voters who opposed hiring a candidate to favour tenuring him, even after a poor probationary performance. We characterise the opti- mal voting rule when N = 2. A patient or perceptive committee does best with a (weak) majority at the hiring stage and unanimity at the tenure stage. An impatient or imperceptive committee does best under a double (weak) majority rule. If particularly impatient or imperceptive, this rule implies that any hire is automatically tenured. Perversely, the performance of a patient, imperceptive committee improves as its perceptiveness further declines.

Keywords: intertemporal strategic voting; real options; tenure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C73 D71 D72 D80 G12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-gth and nep-pol
Date: 2007-03
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://ftp.bham.ac.uk/pub/RePEc/pdf/070319twostage.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: Optimal two stage committee voting rules (2004)
Working Paper: Optimal two stage committee voting rules (2006)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bir:birmec:04-23rr

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of Birmingham
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Colin Rowat ().