A policy-based rationalization of collective rules: Dimensionality, specialized houses, and decentralized authority

Juliette T. Guemmegne and Roland Pongou

Journal of Mathematical Economics, 2014, vol. 52, issue C, 182-193

Abstract: We offer a policy-basis for interpreting, justifying, and designing (3, 3)-political rules, a large class of collective rules analogous to those governing the selection of papers in peer-reviewed journals, where each referee chooses to accept, reject, or invite a resubmission of a paper, and an editor aggregates his own and referees’ opinions into one of these three recommendations. We prove that any such rule is a weighted multicameral rule: a policy is collectively approved at a given level if and only if it is approved by a minimal number of chambers — the dimension of the rule — where each chamber evaluates a different aspect of the policy using a weighted rule, with each evaluator’s weight or authority possibly varying across chambers depending on his area(s) of expertise. These results imply that a given rule is only suitable for evaluating finite-dimensional policies whose dimension corresponds to that of the rule, and they provide a rationale for using different rules to pass different policies even within the same organization. We further introduce the concept of compatibility with a rule and exploit its topological properties to propose a method to construct integer weights corresponding to evaluators’ possible judgments under a given rule, which are more intuitive and easier to interpret for policymakers. Our findings shed light on multicameralism in political institutions and multi-criteria group decision-making in the firm. We provide applications to peer review politics, rating systems, and real-world organizations.

Keywords: (3,3)-political rules; Multicameralism; Multi-criteria group decision-making; Decentralized authority; Rule suitability and design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Related works:
Working Paper: A Policy-Based Rationalization of Collective Rules: Dimensionality, Specialized Houses, and Decentralized Authority (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:mateco:v:52:y:2014:i:c:p:182-193

DOI: 10.1016/j.jmateco.2013.11.003

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