Delegation or Voting

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Delegation or Voting

Author Info

Otto H. Swank () (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Bauke Visser () (Erasmus University Rotterdam)

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Abstract

Collective decision procedures should balance the incentives they provide to acquire information and their capacity to aggregate private information. In a decision problem in which a project can be accepted or rejected once information about its quality has been acquired or not, we compare the performance of a delegation structure with that of two voting procedures. Delegation makes one's acceptance decision pivotal by definition. The decisiveness of one's vote in a voting procedure depends on the other agent's vote. This in turn determines the decision to acquire information. In the debate about a rational choice foundation of Condorcet's Jury Theorem, the distribution of information was left exogenous. Mixed (acceptance) strategies were required to validate the Theorem. Endogenizing information acquisition as we do reveals mixed (acceptance) strategies to be detrimental for welfare as they lead to indifference between buying and not buying information.

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Paper provided by Tinbergen Institute in its series Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers with number 02-005/1.

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Date of creation: 22 Jan 2002
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Handle: RePEc:dgr:uvatin:20020005

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Models of Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

NEP-ALL-2002-06-13 (All new papers)
NEP-CDM-2002-06-13 (Collective Decision-Making)
NEP-REG-2002-06-13 (Regulation)

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:

Piketty, Thomas, 1999. "The information-aggregation approach to political institutions," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 43(4-6), pages 791-800, April. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
Wit, Jorgen, 1998. "Rational Choice and the Condorcet Jury Theorem," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 22(2), pages 364-376, February. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
Cukierman, A. & Spiegel, Y., 1998. "When do Representative and Direct Democracies Lead to Similar Policy Choices?," Papers 21-98, Tel Aviv.
Gilligan, Thomas W & Krehbiel, Keith, 1997. "Specialization Decisions within Committee," Journal of Law, Economics and Organization, Oxford University Press, vol. 13(2), pages 366-86, October.
Sah, Raaj Kumar & Stiglitz, Joseph E, 1988. "Committees, Hierarchies and Polyarchies," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 98(391), pages 451-70, June. [Downloadable!] (restricted)

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