When giving to one charity, individuals face two types of uncertainty, descriptive and normative. We report a between-subjects charitable-giving experiment which provides first data on normative uncertainty (n=1890). In our experiment, participants can bid for either descriptive information,...

Conflicts of interest arise between a decision maker and agents who have information pertinent to the problem because of differences in their preferences over outcomes. We show how the decision maker can extract the information by distorting the decisions that will be taken, and show that only...

We consider a committee that makes a decision on a project on behalf of 'the public'. Members of the committee agree on the a priori value of the project, and hold additional private information about its consequences. They are experts who care both about the value of the project and about being...

An inherent problem in measuring the influence of expert reviews on the demand for experience goods is that a correlation between good reviews and high demand may be spurious, induced by an underlying correlation with unobservable quality signals. Using the timing of the reviews by two popular...

Complex and important policy decisions are often made with advice from a committee of experts, where experts first convene and discuss, before finalizing their collective decision with a vote. We show that the voting structure (whether the experts vote sequentially or simultaneously) plays a...