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...

The authors use a two-period matching model with initial uncertainty about productivities of participants to analyze incentives for early contracting or unraveling. Unraveling provides insurance in the absence of complete markets but causes inefficient assignments. Unraveling is more likely the...