Committee Design in the Presence of Communication

Dino Gerardi and Leeat Yariv
Additional contact information
Leeat Yariv: University of California at Los Angeles

No 1411, Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers from Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University

Abstract: The goal of this paper is to introduce communication in a collective choice environment with information acquisition. We concentrate on decision panels that are comprised of agents sharing a common goal and having a joint task. Members of the panel decide whether to acquire costly information or not, preceding the communication stage. We take a mechanism design approach and consider a designer who can choose the size of the decision panel, the procedure by which it selects the collective choice, and the communication protocol by which its members abide prior to casting their individual action choices. We characterize the solution of this extended design problem. We find that the optimal communication protocol in such an environment balances a tradeoff between inducing players to acquire information and extracting the maximal amount of information from them. In particular, the optimal device may lead to suboptimal aggregation of information from a statistical point of view. Furthermore, groups producing the optimal collective decisions are bounded in size. Comparative statics results shed light on the regularities the design solution exhibits. For example, the expected utility of all agents decreases with the cost of private information and increases with its accuracy, but the optimal panel size is not monotonic in the signals' accuracy.

Keywords: Communication; Collective Choice; Mechanism Design; Strategic Voting; Information Acquisition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 D72 D78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2003-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published in Games and Economic Behavior "Information Acquisition in Committee," forthcoming

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Working Paper: Committee Design in the Presence of Communication (2004)
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