consensus building how to persuade a group many decisions in private and public organizations are made by groups the paper explores strategies that the sponsor of a proposal may employ to convince a qualified majority of group members to approve the proposal adopting a mechanism design approach to communication it emphasizes the need to distill information selectively to key members of the group and to engineer persuasion cascades in which members who are brought on board sway the opinion of others the paper unveils the factors such as the extent of congruence among group members and between them and the sponsor and the size and governance of the group that condition the sponsor s ability to maneuver and get his project approved

corn models in the classical tradition p sraffa considered historically this paper deals with the historical plausibility and analytical validity of what has come to be termed the corn model the ongoing debate is firstly reviewed it is suggested that a definite answer should be based on the logic of the material produce comparisons although these do not lead invariably to a sound application of the corn model neither do they constitute per se a sign of classicism however it is shown that before and after ricardo corn models of various sorts and logical stringency were developed in order to cope with the problem of 1 the determination of the rate of profit in the only basic sector of the economy agriculture independent of any valuation and 2 its primacy over the overall economy copyright 1991 by oxford university press

optimal voting schemes with costly information acquisition a group of individuals with identical preferences must make a decision under uncertainty about which decision is best before the decision is made each agent can privately acquire a costly and imperfect signal we discuss how to design a mechanism for eliciting and aggregating the collected information so as to maximize ex ante social welfare we first show that of all mechanisms a sequential one is optimal and works as follows at random one agent at a time is selected to acquire information and report the resulting signal agents are informed of neither their position in the sequence nor of other reports acquiring information when called upon and reporting truthfully is an equilibrium we next characterize the ex ante optimal scheme among all ex post efficient mechanisms in this mechanism a decision is made when the precision of the posterior exceeds a cut off that decreases with each additional report the restriction to ex post efficiency is shown to be without loss when the available signals are sufficiently imprecise on the other hand ex post efficient mechanisms are shown to be suboptimal when the cost of information acquisition is sufficiently small

information aggregation rationality and the condorcet jury theorem the condorcet jury theorem states that majorities are more likely than any single individual to select the better of two alternatives when there exists uncertainty about which of the two alternatives is in fact preferred most extant proofs of this theorem implicitly make the behavioral assumption that individuals vote sincerely in the collective decision making a seemingly innocuous assumption given that individuals are taken to possess a common preference for selecting the better alternative however in the model analyzed here we find that sincere behavior by all individuals is not rational even when individuals have such a common preference in particular sincere voting does not constitute a nash equilibrium a satisfactory rational choice foundation for the claim that majorities invariably do better than individuals therefore has yet to be derived

minority voting rights can maximize majority welfare i use condorcet s information aggregation model to show that sometimes the best possible decision procedure for the majority allows the minority to enforce its favored outcome even when overruled by a majority special voting power gives the minority an incentive to participate meaningfully and more participation means more information is aggregated which makes the majority better off this result can be understood as a mathematical corroboration of lani guinier s arguments that voting procedures can be designed to encourage minority participation benefitting everyone

asymmetric information and legislative rules some amendments we reexamine the major tenets of the informational theory of legislative rules focusing on the informational efficiency of rules with varying degrees of restrictiveness when committees are heterogeneous full efficiency is attainable under the unrestrictive open rule as well as the somewhat restrictive modified rule in contrast the restrictive closed rule always leads to inefficiencies when committees are homogeneous the situation is different all equilibria are inefficient regardless of legislative rules but the closed rule leads to greater informational efficiency than does the open rule furthermore the efficiency gains under the closed rule more than offset distributional losses regardless of the degree of preference divergence we also examine the incentives provided by the different rules for information acquisition and committee specialization

interactions neighborhood selection and housing demand abstract this paper contributes to the growing literature that aims at identifying and measuring the impact of social context on individual economic behavior we develop a model of housing structure demand with neighborhood effects and neighborhood choice modeling neighborhood choice is of fundamental importance in estimating and understanding endogenous and contextual neighborhood effects controlling for non random sorting into neighborhoods allows for unbiased estimates and provides a means for identifying endogenous neighborhood effects estimation of the model exploits a household level data set that has been augmented with contextual information at two different levels scales of aggregation one is at the neighborhood level consisting of about ten neighbors with the data coming from the neighborhood clusters sub sample of the american housing survey a second level is the census tract to which these dwelling units belong these data were geocoded by means of privileged access to confidential us census data our results for the neighborhood choice model indicate that individuals prefer to live near others like themselves our estimates of the housing structure demand equation confirm that neighborhood effects are important in particular one s demand for housing depends on the mean of neighbors demand for housing

a model of expertise we study a model in which perfectly informed experts offer advice to a decision maker whose actions affect the welfare of all experts are biased and thus may wish to pull the decision maker in different directions and to different degrees when the decision maker consults only a single expert the expert withholds substantial information from the decision maker we ask whether this situation is improved by having the decision maker sequentially consult two experts we first show that there is no perfect bayesian equilibrium in which full revelation occurs when both experts are biased in the same direction it is never beneficial to consult both in contrast when experts are biased in opposite directions it is always beneficial to consult both indeed in this case full revelation may be induced in an extended debate by introducing the possibility of rebuttal

in defense of unanimous jury verdicts mistrials communication and strategic voting the requirement of unanimous jury verdicts in criminal trials is widely believed to reduce the likelihood of convicting the innocent this belief depends largely upon the assumption that jurors will vote nonstrategically based on their impression of the trial evidence recent literature however has questioned this assumption and feddersen and pesendorfer propose a model in which it is never a nash equilibrium for jurors to vote nonstrategically under unanimity rule and equilibrium behavior produces higher probabilities of both convicting the innocent and acquitting the guilty under unanimity rule than under numerous alternatives i extend this work by incorporating two additional features of actual jury procedure the possibility of mistrial and communication among jurors under each circumstance i demonstrate that nonstrategic voting is a nash equilibrium under fairly general conditions and that unanimity performs better than any alternative rule in minimizing probability of trial error and maximizing expected utility

opinions as incentives we study costs and benefits of differences of opinion between an adviser and a decision maker even when they share the same underlying preferences over decisions a difference of opinion about payoff relevant information leads to strategic information acquisition and transmission a decision maker faces a fundamental trade off a greater difference of opinion increases an adviser s incentives to acquire information but exacerbates the strategic disclosure of any information that is acquired nevertheless when choosing from a rich pool of opinion types it is optimal for a decision maker to select an adviser with some difference of opinion centralization of authority is essential to harness these incentive gains since delegation to the adviser can discourage effort

elections with privately informed parties and voters this paper studies a situation in which parties are betterinformed than voters about the optimal policies for voters weshow that voters are able to infer the parties information byobserving their electoral positions even if parties have policypreferences which differ substantially from the median voter s unlike previous work that reach opposite conclusions we assumethat voters have some private information of their own if theinformation available to voters is biased parties attempts toinfluence voters beliefs will result in less than fullconvergence even if parties know with certainty the optimalpolicy for the median voter

conflicts and common interests in committees committees improve decisions by pooling members independent information but promote manipulation obfuscation and exaggeration of private information when members have conflicting preferences committee decision procedures transform continuous data into ordered ranks through voting this coarsens the transmission of information but controls strategic manipulations and allows some degree of information sharing each member becomes more cautious in casting the crucial vote than when he alone makes the decision based on own information increased quality of one member s information results in his casting the crucial vote more often committees make better decisions for members than does delegation

costly participation and heterogeneous preferences in informational committees informational committees are groups of people who are designated to gather information this article develops a simple model of committee size based on costly participation and preference heterogeneity in a setting in which the information structure and policy preferences are both represented by normal random variables i characterize an equilibrium under the mean decision rule and derive the optimal committee size i show that when effort costs are sufficiently high preference heterogeneity can provide members additional incentives to gather information and thus the optimal committee size and the principal s expected payoff can increase in the heterogeneity of committee members policy preferences

committee design with endogenous information this paper is concerned with the arrangements for collective decision making in a world where agents must be motivated to acquire information the analysis identifies some basic forces shaping the design of panels of decision makers referees managers jurors etc in situations where decision makers are useful only in so far as they expend some effort to gain information about the alternatives at hand these situations are common one being the refereeing process where an editor requires the opinions of a number of experts who must read the paper acquire information in order to give an opinion as to publication analogously in committees which screen applicants to a programme the committee members must gain information about the applicant s qualifications and likelihood of success in order to evaluate whether to admit him her finally in trial juries it is important that jurors pay attention to the evidence in order to make an informed judgement 1 we focus on environments where information is a public good in the sense that the social benefits of one decision maker acquiring information exceed the private benefits a good mechanism in this environment must not only aggregate information efficiently but also induce the decision makers to acquire information we analyse the design of voting mechanisms our problem is to choose two parameters which determine both the incentive to acquire information and the efficiency with which information is aggregated the first parameter is the size of the decision making unit the number of committee members the second is the plurality required to overturn the status quo the voting rule our main result is this a voting rule that requires a large plurality in the extreme unanimity to upset the status quo can be optimal only if the information available to each committee member is sufficiently accurate when individual information is noisy the drawback

large electorates and decisive minorities there are many instances in which even in a democracy the political preferences held by a minority of the electorate are reflected in political outcomes it is shown that for a simple two alternative election environment characterized by costly voting and private information when the expected population is very large the alternative preferred by more expected zealous voters who have either large stakes in the outcome of the election or small costs of participating wins with high probability in any equilibrium even if the expected proportion of the entire electorate that shares that preference is arbitrarily small this is an undersirable outcome under either of two natural but very different normative criteria

continuous decisions by a committee median versus average mechanisms abstract a group of strategic agents with diverse private information and interdependent preferences has to take a continuous collective decision i study the design of the decision making procedure from the viewpoint of a utilitarian social planner for uniformly distributed information the implementation of the average report as decision dominates the implementation of the median report when the set of admissible reports is optimally designed this is true for any number of agents and for any degree of interdependence the result extends to a general class of distributions when the number of agents is large

convergence results for unanimous voting abstract this paper derives a necessary condition for unanimous voting to converge to the perfect information outcome when voters are only imperfectly informed about the alternatives under some continuity assumptions the condition is also sufficient for the existence of a sequence of equilibria that exhibits convergence the requirement is equivalent to that found by milgrom 1979 econometrica47 679 688 for information aggregation in single prize auctions an example illustrates that convergence may be reasonably fast for small committees however if voters have common preferences unanimity is not the optimal voting rule unanimity rule makes sense only as a way to ensure minority views are respected journal of economic literature classification numbers d72 d82 d44

meetings with costly participation we study a collective decision making process in which people interested in an issue may participate at a cost in a meeting and the resulting decision is a compromise among the participants preferences we show that the equilibrium number of participants is small and their positions are extreme and when the compromise is the median the outcome is likely to be random the model and its equilibria are consistent with evidence on the procedures and outcomes of us regulatory hearings jel d7 h0 l5

abstention ideology and information acquisition we consider an election in which each voter can collect information of different precision voters have asymmetric information and preferences that vary both in terms of ideology and intensity in contrast to all other models of voting with endogenous information in equilibrium voters collect information of different qualities we show that information and abstention are not necessarily negatively correlated some voters are more likely to abstain the more informed they are we also discuss the manner in which incentives to acquire information are non monotonic in terms of both ideology and the level of intensity

relying on the information of interested parties we investigate the conventional wisdom that competition among interested parties attempting to influence a decisionmaker by providing verifiable information elicits all relevant information we find that if the decisionmaker is strategically sophisticated and well informed about the relevant variables and about the preferences of the interested party or parties competition may be unnecessary to achieve this result if the decisionmaker is unsophisticated or not well informed competition is not generally sufficient if the interested parties interests are sufficiently opposed however or if the decisionmaker is seeking to advance the parties welfare then competition can reduce or even eliminate the decisionmaker s need for prior knowledge about the relevant variables and for strategic sophistication in other settings only the combination of competition among information providers and a sophisticated skepticism is sufficient to allow effective decisionmaking

learning in equilibrium models of arbitration this paper analyzes strategic communication in equilibrium models of conventional and final offer interest arbitration both models emphasize the role of learning by the arbitrator from the parties offers about the state of the employment relationship which is known to the parties but not to the arbitrator in both models the arbitrators equilibrium behavior is identical to the reduced form decision rule typically assumed in the empirical literature the paper thereby provides a structural interpretation for the existing empirical work the paper also represents progress towards a complete theory of arbitration because it satisfies three conditions that will be required of any such theory first the models predictions match the existing empirical evidence second the models describe equilibrium behavior and third the models are built on a common set of assumptions about preferences information and commitment the paper therefore not only provides an equilibrium foundation for the intuition that the arbitrator might learn from the parties offers but also uses the idea of learning to develop a unified analytical treatment of the two major forms of interest arbitration this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item