IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/29557.html

Individual and Collective Information Acquisition: An Experimental Study

Author

Listed:
  • Pëllumb Reshidi
  • Alessandro Lizzeri
  • Leeat Yariv
  • Jimmy H. Chan
  • Wing Suen

Abstract

Many committees—juries, political task forces, etc.—spend time gathering costly information before reaching a decision. We report results from lab experiments focused on such information-collection processes. We consider decisions governed by individuals and groups and compare how voting rules affect outcomes. We also contrast static information collection, as in classical hypothesis testing, with dynamic collection, as in sequential hypothesis testing. Several insights emerge. Static information collection is excessive, and sequential information collection is non-stationary, producing declining decision accuracies over time. Furthermore, groups using majority rule yield especially hasty and inaccurate decisions. Nonetheless, sequential information collection is welfare enhancing relative to static collection, particularly when unanimous rules are used.

Suggested Citation

  • Pëllumb Reshidi & Alessandro Lizzeri & Leeat Yariv & Jimmy H. Chan & Wing Suen, 2021. "Individual and Collective Information Acquisition: An Experimental Study," NBER Working Papers 29557, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29557
    Note: IO LE PE POL
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w29557.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bandyopadhyay, Siddhartha & Deb, Moumita & Lohse, Johannes & McDonald, Rebecca, 2024. "The Swing Voter’s Curse Revisited: Transparency’s Impact on Committee Voting," Working Papers 0744, University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics.
    2. Nicol√°s Figueroa & JosÔøΩ-Alberto Guerra & Francisco Silva, 2022. "The role of information in collective decisions," Documentos CEDE 20508, Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE.
    3. Marcello Puca & Krista Jabs Saral & Simone M. Sepe, 2023. "The Value of Consensus. An Experimental Analysis of Costly Deliberation," CSEF Working Papers 680, Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy.
    4. Calford, Evan M. & Chakraborty, Anujit, 2025. "The value of and demand for diverse news sources," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 151(C), pages 24-41.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior
    • C92 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Group Behavior
    • D7 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making
    • D8 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:nbr:nberwo:29557. 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.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.