Agenda-Manipulation in Ranking

Abstract

We study the susceptibility of committee governance (e.g. by boards of directors), modelled as the collective determination of a ranking of a set of alternatives, to manipulation of the order in which pairs of alternatives are voted on—agenda-manipulation. We exhibit an agenda strategy called insertion sort that allows a self-interested committee chair with no knowledge of how votes will be cast to do as well as if she had complete knowledge. Strategies with this ‘regret-freeness’ property are characterised by their efficiency, and by their avoidance of two intuitive errors. What distinguishes regret-free strategies from each other is how they prioritise among alternatives; insertion sort prioritises lexicographically.

Setbacks, Shutdowns, and Overruns

“…As in Madsen (2022), the principal must provide incentives for the agent to report that the project has gone bad and should be terminated. A third recent paper featuring a single privately observed transition is Curello and Sinander (2021). Similar in spirit but opposite in application to Madsen (2022), a technological breakthrough occurs exogenously at some random time witnessed only by the agent.…”

Conveying value via categories

“…Curello and Sinander (2022) perform a related exercise. They study a persuasion environment in which sender and receiver have the same prior, but the sender's payoff is a potentially nonlinear function of the receiver's posterior mean.…”

“…Note that in this special case, the nonlinearity of U can also be viewed as a change of the sender's prior. We can use this rewriting to perform analogous exercise to Curello and Sinander's (2022, Theorems 1 and 2): an increase in , which increases the convexity of U , maps into increased convexity of Ŝ . With an argument parallel to that in Proposition 6, we can show that this heightened convexity thus implies an increase in the informativeness of optimal categorizations 15…”