Unanimity under Ambiguity

Simona Fabrizi (), Steffen Lippert, Addison Pan () and Matthew Ryan ()
Additional contact information
Simona Fabrizi: Department of Economics and Centre for Mathematical Social Science, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Addison Pan: International Office and Centre for Mathematical Social Science, University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Matthew Ryan: School of Economics and Finance, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand, and Centre for Mathematical Social Science, University of Auckland, New Zealand.

No 2024-01, Working Papers from Auckland University of Technology, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper considers a binary decision to be made by a committee- canonically, a jury- through a voting procedure. Each juror must vote on whether a defendant is guilty or not guilty. The voting rule aggregates the votes to determine whether the defendant is convicted or acquitted. We focus on the unanimity rule (convict if and only if all vote guilty), and we consider jurors who share ambiguous prior beliefs as in Ellis (2016). Our contribution is twofold. First, we identify all symmetric equilibria of these voting games. Second, we show that ambiguity may drastically undermine McLennan's (1998) results on decision quality: unlike in the absence of ambiguity, the ex ante optimal symmetric strategy profile need not be an equilibrium; indeed, there are games for which it is possible to reduce both types of error starting from any (non-trivial) equilibrium.

Keywords: : ambiguous priors; voting problems; decision quality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C02 D71 D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-gth and nep-mic
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Related works:
Working Paper: Unanimity under Ambiguity (2021)
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