Patience and Time Consistency in Collective Decisions

We present new evidence from the lab on the outcomes resulting from collective and individual decisions over time. We combined static and longitudinal methods to test four conditions on individual and collective time preferences: impatience, stationarity, age independence, and dynamic consistency. The collective decision process was designed to favor coordination through initial communication over voting intentions. Our main results are the following. First, individuals were impatient and deviated from consistent behavior. On the other hand, groups made patient and highly consistent decisions. Our voting mechanism helped the groups to converge and make stable and dynamically consistent decisions.