Symmetric and Asymmetric Committees

Ruth Ben-Yashar and Leif Danziger ()

No 3501, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: This paper studies the assignment of decision makers to two committees that make decisions by a simple majority rule. There is an even number of decision makers at each of various skill levels and each committee has an odd number of members. Surprisingly, even with the symmetric assumptions in the spirit of Condorcet, a symmetric composition of committees is not always optimal. In other words, decision makers with different skill levels should not generally be evenly divided among the committees. However, in the special case of only two skill levels, it is optimal to compose the committees evenly.

Keywords: committees; collective decision making; simple majority rule (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D70 D71 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Symmetric and asymmetric committees (2011)
Working Paper: Symmetric and Asymmetric Committees (2011)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_3501

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