Information Transfer and Aggregation in an Uninformed Committee: A Model for the Selection and Use of Biased Expert Advice

Abstract

Abstract:A committee of five uses majority rule for decisions on two public goods. Individual committee member preferences depend on a state of nature that is unknown to the committee members but the state of nature is known to two experts who have preferences about committee decisions. Experts have no vote on the committee but provide a recommendation to the committee at the opening of a meeting. Two experts are selected who have known, opposing biases -a dyadic mechanism. The results reveal that experts do not tell the truth but committee decisions are as if committee members know what the experts know. The information transfer occurs because committee members anticipate the biases and properly infer the information held by the experts.JEL classification: C90; D71; D81

Communication with multiple senders: An experiment

“…An additional sender in one dimension (with some additional uncertainty on the preferences) is analyzed in Minozzi and Woon (2015), in a companion paper to the present one (Vespa and Wilson (2016)), and in Wilson (2014), while Evdokimov and Garfagnini (2014) examine communication/centralization between elements of the same firm. Plott and Llewellyn (2015) study an environment with two biased senders and two issues, where the eventual decision is voted on by a committee of five. The preferences of the committee members differ and each member votes after receiving the public advice from the informed experts.…”