Information acquisition in committees

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to illustrate the significance of information acquisition in mechanism design. We provide a stark example of a mechanism design problem in a collective choice environment with information acquisition. We concentrate on committees that are comprised of agents sharing a common goal and having a joint task. Members of the committee decide whether to acquire costly information or not at the outset and are then asked to report their private information. The designer can choose the size of the committee, as well as the procedure by which it selects the collective choice, i.e., the correspondence between agents' reports and distributions over collective choices. We show that the ex ante optimal device may be ex post inefficient, i.e., lead to suboptimal aggregation of information from a statistical point of view. For particular classes of parameters, we describe the full structure of the optimal mechanisms.

Ignorance and bias in collective decisions

“…From the theoretical standpoint, Ordeshook and Palfrey (1988), Austen-Smith and Banks (1996) and Pesendorfer (1996, 1997) first studied Bayesian equilibria of voting in committees with private information. Mukhopadhaya (2005), Persico (2004), Martinelli (2006Martinelli ( , 2007, and Gerardi and Yariv (2008) introduced costly information acquisition in collective decision environments. Our theoretical model differs from that literature in that we allow for abstention in a situation in which voters have heterogenous information costs, and we considers unanimity voting in addition to majority voting.…”

Abstention, ideology and information acquisition

“…Note that these arguments rely on the fact that education is related to information, and information is then related to the desire to vote. 16 In this 13 Essentially that  (  ) is symmetric around 1 2 and   =    1 2 . 14 Details can be provided upon request.…”

“…4 [24], [31], [13], [26], [16], [4] and [18] assume that voters are homogenous (at least those willing to collect information) and/or that each voter can receive an independent draw from a common distribution. [25] allows for heterogeneity and the option of acquiring information of different quality, but restricts the environment so that, in equilibrium, every informed voter has the same incentives to collect information.…”

“…In this case, we would have concluded that abstention is not an equilibrium phenomenon!!! 16 For an argument that does not link education and turnout via information see [29] who argue that educated people tend to register more and this is what drives the relation between education and turnout. subsection we illustrate how our model contributes to this debate.…”

An Experimental Study of Collective Deliberation

“…5 Lizzeri and Yariv (2011) achieved a similar result for certain environments when considering communication protocols that entail a stage of costly information collection and a stage of collective decision. Gerardi and Yariv (2008) effectively considered communication protocols as a design instrument in a particular mechanism design setup pertaining to information acquisition within collective choice. Meirowitz (2006) considered a mechanism design problem that generates incentives for protocols to be carried out in a particular way.…”