This paper studies a collective decision problem in which a group of individuals with interdependent preferences vote whether or not to implement a public project of unknown value. A utilitarian social planner aggregates these votes according to a majority rule; but, unlike what is commonly...

A committee of experts votes between a multi-attribute alternative and status quo. Each expert is a biased specialist who can privately evaluate only one attribute and puts more weight on it. We study whether a social-minded principal would compose the committee of more or less biased experts....

We examine the consequences of vote transparency in committees whose members fear being blamed by partisan observers for casting an unfavorable vote. We show that such social pressure, like optimal taxation, can improve the collective decision by mitigating a voting externality. Hence,...