On Committees of Experts

Abstract

A committee makes a decision on a project on behalf of "the public." Members of the committee agree on the a priori value of the project, and hold additional private information about its consequences. They are experts who care about the value of the project and about being considered well informed. Before voting on the project, members can exchange their private information simultaneously. We show that reputational concerns make the a priori unconventional decision more attractive and lead committees to show a united front. These results hold irrespective of whether information can be manipulated or not. Also, reputational concerns induce members to manipulate information and vote strategically if their preferences differ considerably from those of the member casting the decisive vote. Our last result is that the optimal voting rule balances the quality of information exchange and the alignment of interests of the decisive voter with those of the public. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Deliberation with Evidence

“…Contrary to cheap-talk deliberation, where the set of available messages does not vary with individuals' private information (e.g., Austen-Smith and Feddersen 2005, 2006; Coughlan 2000; Doraszelski, Gerardi, and Squintani 2003; Gerardi and Yariv 2007; Levy 2007; Meirowitz 2006, 2007; and Visser and Swank 2007), Axiom 2 formalizes the assumption that any individual can provide evidence for the signal that she privately observed. By reporting a particular message that is available only for a given signal, an individual proves to the committee that she observed that signal.…”

“… 5 In contrast to our article, all models of deliberation assume a cheap-talk debate (see also, e.g., Gerardi and Yariv 2007, Levy 2007, Meirowitz 2006, 2007, and Visser and Swank 2007). Two exceptions are Bade and Rice (2007), who study the incentives for information acquisition voters prior to deliberation, and Schulte 2010, who studies the impact of information environments on full information aggregation.…”

Monetary Policy Committees: Meetings and Outcomes

“…Uncertain level of judgment has not been frequently modeled in the jury literature. Recent related work includes Visser and Swank (2007).…”

“…Meade and Stasavage (2008) show that a publication of material that allows for identifying individual opinions (such as transcripts) creates strong incentives for committee members (who also care about their reputation) to present a united front to the outside world. This is because an agreement makes them appear more knowledgeable (see also Swank et al, 2007).…”

Delegation to a Group

“…Studying this setup, we link the previous delegation literature to the literature on decision making in committees of careerist experts. Most of the papers in this literature consider the case of costless information (e.g., Levy 2007a, b;Visser and Swank 2007;Gersbach and Hahn 2008;Mattozzi and Nakaguma 2017;Fehrler and Hughes 2018) with two exceptions (Gersbach andHahn 2012, Swank and. None of them studies the decision to delegate a task to a committee, which is the focus of our study.…”