On Committees of Experts

Bauke Visser and Otto Swank ()

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2007, vol. 122, issue 1, 337-372

Abstract: A committee makes a decision on a project on behalf of "the public." Members of the committee agree on the a priori value of the project, and hold additional private information about its consequences. They are experts who care about the value of the project and about being considered well informed. Before voting on the project, members can exchange their private information simultaneously. We show that reputational concerns make the a priori unconventional decision more attractive and lead committees to show a united front. These results hold irrespective of whether information can be manipulated or not. Also, reputational concerns induce members to manipulate information and vote strategically if their preferences differ considerably from those ofthe member casting the decisive vote. Our last result is that the optimal voting rule balances the quality of information exchange and the alignment of interests of the decisive voter with those of the public.

Date: 2007
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (109)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1162/qjec.122.1.337 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: On Committees of Experts (2005)
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:oup:qjecon:v:122:y:2007:i:1:p:337-372.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().