A central feature of dynamic collective decision-making is that the rules that govern the procedures for future decision-making and the distribution of political power across players are determined by current decisions. For example, current constitutional change must take into account how the...

Two laboratory experiments - one a statistical urn problem, the other a monetary policy experiment - were run to test the commonly-believed hypothesis that groups make decisions more slowly than individuals do. Surprisingly, this turns out not to be true there is no significant difference in...

We provide the first tests to distinguish whether individual investors equally balance their overall portfolios (naïve portfolio diversification--NPD) or engage in naïve buying diversification (NBD)--equally balancing values in same-day purchases of multiple assets. We find NBD in purchases of...

A decision maker constructs a convex set of nonnegative martingales to use as likelihood ratios that represent parametric alternatives to a baseline model and also non-parametric models statistically close to both the baseline model and the parametric alternatives. Max-min expected utility over...

We calculate the socially optimal level of illiquidity in an economy populated by households with taste shocks and present bias (Amador, Werning, and Angeletos 2006). The government chooses mandatory contributions to respective spending/savings accounts, each with a different pre-retirement...

Committees improve decisions by pooling independent information of members, but promote manipulation, obfuscation, and exaggeration of private evidence when members have conflicting preferences. We study how self-interest mediates these conflicting forces. When members' preferences differ, no...

We develop a framework of group corruption via back-door negotiations between an outside initiator and an authority of decision-makers in a hierarchical organization. We examine the role played by the architecture of a multi-tier authority and determine under such a structure how bargaining...

Collective decision making requires preference aggregation even if no ideal aggregation method exists (Arrow, 1950). We investigate how individuals think groups should aggregate members' ordinal preferences--that is, how they interpret "the will of the people." Our experiment elicits revealed...

We consider dynamic processes of coalition formation in which a principal bargains sequentially with a group of agents. This problem is at the core of a variety of applications in economics and politics, including a lobbyist seeking to pass a bill, an entrepreneur setting up a start-up, or a...

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...