Optimal delay in committees

Ettore Damiano (), Hao Li and Wing Suen

Games and Economic Behavior, 2021, vol. 129, issue C, 449-475

Abstract: Delay after disagreement in committee decision making may foster information aggregation but is costly ex post. When there is an upper bound on delay that can be credibly imposed, repeated delays can improve the ex ante welfare of committee members. An ex ante optimal dynamic delay mechanism does not impose the maximum credible delay after each disagreement. Instead, it induces in equilibrium start-and-stop cycles where players alternate between making the maximum concession to avoid disagreement and making no concession at all. The start-and-stop feature is robust to modeling delay cost by discounting instead of money-burning, and the optimal mechanism is shown to be “redesign-proof” when there is also an upper bound on the number of rounds of delay that can be credibly imposed.

Keywords: Dynamic delay mechanism; Localized variations method; Start-and-stop (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D7 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089982562100083X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:gamebe:v:129:y:2021:i:c:p:449-475

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2021.06.008

Access Statistics for this article

Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai

More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().