This paper examines optimal decision making under three different organizational forms: committees, hierarchies and polyarchies. Our focus is on the trade-off between errors of rejecting good projects versus errors of accepting bad projects, and on the trade-off between gains from more extensive...

We study information aggregation in organizational decision-making for the financing of entrepreneurial ventures. We introduce a formal model of voting where agents face costly tacit information to improve their decision quality. Equilibrium outcomes suggest a theoretical tension for group...

The main criticism to the aggregation of individual preferences under majority rules refers to the possibility of reaching inconsistent collective decisions from the election process. In these cases, the collective preference includes cycles and even could prevent the election of any alternative...

When faced with the chance to help someone in mortal danger, what is our first response? Do we leap into action, only later considering the risks to ourselves? Or must instinctive self-preservation be overcome by will-power in order to act? We investigate this question by examining the testimony...

Moore & Shannon's theorem is the cornerstone in reliability theory, but cannot be applied to human systems in its original form. A generalization to human systems would therefore be of considerable interest because the choice of organization structure can remedy reliability problems that...

We review two fundamentally different ways that decision time is related to cooperation. First, studies have experimentally manipulated decision time to understand how cooperation is related to the use of intuition versus deliberation. Current evidence supports the claim that time pressure (and,...

Recent studies suggest that cooperative decision-making in one-shot interactions is a history-dependent dynamic process: promoting intuition versus deliberation has typically a positive effect on cooperation (dynamism) among people living in a cooperative setting and with no previous experience...

This paper experimentally studies the disposition effects of teams and individuals. The disposition effect describes the phenomenon that investors are reluctant to realize losses, whereas winners are sold too early. Our experiments compare the investments of two-person teams to a setting where...

Before a group can take a decision, its members must agree on a mechanism to aggregate individual preferences. In this paper we present the results of an experiment on the influence of private payoff information and the role of the available alternatives on individuals' mechanism choices in such...

The future transformation of the energy system is a contentious topic, involving a variety of conflicting opinions and interests. In order to structure and evaluate these opinions, we develop a group decision-making process with professional stakeholders and energy experts. The aim of this...