Aggregating experts’ opinions to select the winner of a competition

Pablo Amoros

International Journal of Game Theory, 2020, vol. 49, issue 3, No 8, 833-849

Abstract: Abstract The opinions of a group of experts must be aggregated to determine the deserving winner of a competition. The procedure of aggregation is majoritarian if, whenever a majority of experts honestly believe that a contestant is the best, the given contestant is considered the deserving winner. The fact that an expert believes that a contestant is the best does not necessarily imply that he/she wants this contestant to win as, for example, he/she might be biased in favor of another contestant. A mechanism is thus needed to provide the appropriate incentives to the experts so that, in equilibrium, they choose the deserving winner. We show that if the aggregation procedure is majoritarian, such a mechanism exists only if the experts are totally impartial. This impossibility result is very strong as it does not depend on the concept of ordinal equilibrium. Moreover, it holds even if we replace majoritarianism by unanimity (whenever a contestant is honestly viewed as best by all experts, then that contestant is considered the deserving winner) and anonymity (changing the names of the experts with each opinion would not change the deserving winner).

Keywords: Mechanism design; Social choice; Aggregation of experts’ opinions; Jury (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D71 D78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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DOI: 10.1007/s00182-020-00712-6

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