IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ecm/wc2000/0933.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Consensus and the Accuracy of Signals: Optimal Committee Design with Information Acquisition

Author

Listed:
  • Nicola Persico

    (University of Pennsylvania)

Abstract

We present a model of private production of information in collective decision making. Agents gather costly information, and then aggregate it to produce a collective decision. Because information is a public good, it will be underprovided relative to the social optimum. A ``good'' mechanism must then give incentives to acquire information, as well as aggregate information efficiently. We characterize the voting mechanism that produces the most informed decision. We obtain a necessary condition for the optimal voting rule to be ``consensual'', i.e. close to unanimity or veto power: a consensual voting rule can be optimal only if the information available to each agent is sufficiently accurate. This condition is independent of the preferences of voters and of the cost of information, and links the voting rule to the quality of information available to agents. Our results are robust to introducing heterogeneity of agents.

Suggested Citation

  • Nicola Persico, 2000. "Consensus and the Accuracy of Signals: Optimal Committee Design with Information Acquisition," Econometric Society World Congress 2000 Contributed Papers 0933, Econometric Society.
    • Handle: RePEc:ecm:wc2000:0933
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://fmwww.bc.edu/RePEc/es2000/0933.pdf
    File Function: main text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ecm:wc2000:0933. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Christopher F. Baum (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/essssea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.