Voting in Small Committees

Paolo Balduzzi (), Clara Graziano and Annalisa Luporini ()
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Paolo Balduzzi: Università Cattolica Milano

Working Papers - Economics from Universita' degli Studi di Firenze, Dipartimento di Scienze per l'Economia e l'Impresa

Abstract: We analyze the voting behavior of a small committee that has to approve or reject a proposal whose return is uncertain. Members have heterogenous preferences: some members want to maximize the expected value while other members have a bias toward project approval and ignore their private information. We analyze different voting games when information is costless and communication is not possible, and we provide insights on the optimal composition of these committees. Our main result is that the presence of biased members can improve the voting outcome by simplifying the strategies of unbiased members. Thus, committees with heterogeneous members can function at least as well as homogeneous committees and in some cases they perform better. In particular, when value-maximizing members hold 51% of votes, the socially optimal equilibrium becomes unique.

Keywords: Voting; Small committees. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2011
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-cdm, nep-cta and nep-gth
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Related works:
Journal Article: Voting in small committees (2014)
Working Paper: Voting in Small Committees (2012)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:frz:wpaper:wp2011_01.rdf

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