This paper studies the assignment of decision makers to two committees that make decisions by a simple majority rule …. Surprisingly, even with the symmetric assumptions in the spirit of Condorcet, a symmetric composition of committees is not always … committees. However, in the special case of only two skill levels, it is optimal to compose the committees evenly. …

usefulness of the approach in the context of field experiments on gift exchange. Our results suggest that a BS design requires …

phenomena. However, the empirical foundation of social preferences is largely based on laboratory experiments with self …-selected students as participants. This is potentially problematic as students participating in experiments may behave systematically … experiments with student samples misrepresent the importance of social preferences. Our first study shows that students who …

behalf of society. In addition to a payoff linked to the adequateness of the committee’s decision, each expert receives a … disesteem payoff if he/she voted in favor of an ill-fated innovation. An example is FDA committees, where committee members can … standard voting model, we show that information is aggregated in large committees provided disesteem payoffs are not overly …

. Counterfactual analysis shows that committees add value through aggregating private assessments, but that gains to larger committees … their assessments also have lower precision, mixed committees may not be optimal. …