The problem of aggregating experts' opinions to select the winner of a competition

Pablo Amoros

No 2017-04, Working Papers from Universidad de Málaga, Department of Economic Theory, Málaga Economic Theory Research Center

Abstract: The honest opinions of a group of experts must be aggregated to determine the deserving winner of a competition. The aggregation procedure is majoritarian if, whenever a majority of experts honestly believe that a contestant is the best one, then that contestant is considered the deserving winner. The fact that an expert believes that a contestant is the best one does not necessarily imply that she wants this contestant to win as, for example, she might be biased in favor of some other contestant. Then, we have to design a mechanism that implements the deserving winner. We show that, if the aggregation procedure is majoritarian, such a mechanism exists only if the experts are totally impartial. This impossibility result is very strong as it does not depend on the equilibrium concept considered. Moreover, the result still holds if we replace majoritarianism by anonymity and other reasonable property called respect for the jury. The impossibility result is even stronger if we focus on Nash implementation: no majoritarian aggregation procedure can be Nash implemented even if the experts are totally impartial.

Keywords: mechanism design; aggregation of experts? opinions; jury (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D71 D78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2017-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des, nep-gth, nep-hpe and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://theeconomics.uma.es/malagawpseries/Papers/METCwp2017-4.pdf First version, 2017 (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:mal:wpaper:2017-4

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Universidad de Málaga, Department of Economic Theory, Málaga Economic Theory Research Center Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ascension Andina ().