The Unanimity Rule and Extremely Asymmetric Committees

Ruth Ben-Yashar (benyasr@biu.ac.il) and Leif Danziger (danziger@bgu.ac.il)
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Ruth Ben-Yashar: Bar-Ilan University

No 9875, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper analyzes how to allocate experts into committees that use the unanimity rule to make decisions. We show that an optimal allocation of experts is extremely asymmetric. To reach the optimal allocation, therefore, one needs only to rank the experts in terms of their abilities and then allocate adjacent experts such that an expert's ability tends to vary inversely with the size of his committee. In the special case of three-member committees, we show that the optimal allocation maximizes the sum of the products of the experts' skills in each committee.

Keywords: unanimity rule; extremely asymmetric committees; optimal composition of committees (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2016-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pke
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Published - published in: Journal of Mathematical Economics 2016, 64, 107-112

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Related works:
Journal Article: The unanimity rule and extremely asymmetric committees (2016)
Working Paper: The Unanimity Rule and Extremely Asymmetric Committees (2016)
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