Size and distributional uncertainty, public information and the information paradox

Hans Gersbach

Social Choice and Welfare, 2000, vol. 17, issue 2, 246 pages

Abstract: In this paper we examine the strategic implications of collective acquisition of information in a committee or in a legislature. We show that the prospect of acquiring information can harm a majority even if information is only available by the support of a majority. Moreover, the model provides two results about incentives to acquire information. First, for policies with high distributional uncertainties, we expect that less information is acquired collectively by a committee than for other policies. Second, for policies that show only size uncertainty, our model predicts intense efforts to acquire information collectively.

Date: 2000-02-28
Note: Received: 20 January 1997/Accepted: 15 February 1999
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/00355/papers/0017002/00170241.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted

Related works:
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:spr:sochwe:v:17:y:2000:i:2:p:241-246

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... c+theory/journal/355

Access Statistics for this article

Social Choice and Welfare is currently edited by Bhaskar Dutta, Marc Fleurbaey, Elizabeth Maggie Penn and Clemens Puppe

More articles in Social Choice and Welfare from Springer, The Society for Social Choice and Welfare Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().