This is a survey on the recent game theoretic literature on committee decision making. We consider theoretical work on the role of (i) strategic voting, (ii) costly information acquisition, (iii) conflicting interests, and (iv) communication in committees. Moreover, we review recent experimental...

How large should a monetary policy committee be? Which voting rule should a monetary policy committee adopt? This paper builds on Condorcet's jury threorem to analyse the relationships between committee size and voting rules in a model where policy discussions are subject to a time constraint....

We integrate a monetary policy committee into a New Keynesian model to assess the consequences of the committee's institutional characteristics for welfare. First, we demonstrate that uncertainty about the committee's future composition may be desirable. Second, we show that longer terms of...

Why do sudden and massive social, economic, and political changes occur when and where they do? Are there institutional preconditions that encourage such changes when present and discourage such changes when absent? In this paper, I employ a general model which suggests that massive equilibrium...

I study the policy choices of members of a central bank committee, who are appointed by the government. Central bankers balance their desire to protect the Central Bank's reputation against their interest to be reappointed. Committees can be more successful than single central bankers at...

Many authors have described and modelled Keynesian effects in a Baby-sitting Cooperative (BSC), which has the underlying structure of a single good barter economy. We construct a simple model of the BSC economy to explore this issue, and find very surprising results. Outcomes depend on agents...

This is a survey on the recent game theoretic literature on committee decision making. We consider theoretical work on the role of (i) strategic voting, (ii) costly information acquisition, (iii) conflicting interests, and (iv) communication in committees. Moreover, we review recent experimental...

This paper looks at how the reputation of a monetary policy making committee is jointly determined with the reputations of its individual members. I ask whether individuals have more or less incentive to gain a reputation for being tough on inflation when they are part of a group. I examine the...

Leaks are pervasive in politics. Hence, many committees that nominally operate under secrecy de facto operate under the threat that information might be passed on to outsiders. We study theoretically and experimentally how this possibility affects the behavior of committee members and the...

We argue that societies sometimes choose not to enforce the law to gain “flexibility”. Especially developing countries face a dilemma between discretion and commitment to only partially-contingent rules. Rules are good for incentives, but discretion may be more “flexible”. We embed this...