Symmetric and Asymmetric Committees

Ruth Ben-Yashar () and Leif Danziger ()
Additional contact information
Ruth Ben-Yashar: Bar-Ilan University

No 5782, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

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: collective decision making; committees; simple majority rule (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D70 D71 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2011-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Published - published in: Journal of Mathematical Economics, 2011, 47 (5), 440-447

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp5782.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Symmetric and asymmetric committees (2011)
Working Paper: Symmetric and Asymmetric Committees (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp5782

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().