We study experimentally the effectiveness of communication in common value committees exhibiting publicly known …

of the project and about being considered well informed. Before voting on the project, members can exchange their private … committees to show a united front. These results hold irrespective of whether information can be manipulated or not. Also … those of the member casting the decisive vote. Our last result is that the optimal voting rule balances the quality of …

standard voting model, we show that information is aggregated in large committees provided disesteem payoffs are not overly … disesteem payoff if he/she voted in favor of an ill-fated innovation. An example is FDA committees, where committee members can …, information aggregation fails in large committees and the committee rejects the innovation almost surely, providing an explanation …

We provide an explanation for why committees may behave over-cautiously. A committee of experts makes a decision on a … aggregation fails in large committees: under any majority rule, the committee rejects the innovation almost surely. …

Despite the wide variety of agendas used in legislative settings, the literature on sophisticated voting has focused on … characterize the social choice rules implemented by sophisticated voting on agendas with these two features. I also characterize … related to the prevailing rules for order-of-voting used by legislatures. These results establish a clear connection between …

treatments (different prior and signal distributions) that pose different challenges for the voters. In one, simply voting for …

reasoning), but strikingly overestimate their pivotality when voting (contradicting plain lying aversion). That is, committees … committees. Subjects get private signals about the state of world, send binary messages, and finally vote under either majority … truthful messages and sincere voting. A simple one-parameteric generalization of quantal response equilibrium capturing …

Theory predicts that committees of experts may take decisions that look good but are bad and that they show a united … front to impress evaluators. Although evaluators see through this behavior, committees persist in it only to avoid worse … of committees, words speak louder than costly decisions. Evaluators pick this up. Orthogonality tests show that …

interest in those parameters, voting patterns suggest significant influence of cooperative orientation, political attitudes …