Voting in Large Committees with Disesteem Payoffs: A ‘State of the Art’ Model

We consider a committee of experts that decides to approve or reject an innovation on behalf of society. In addition to a payoff linked to the correctness of the committee's decision, each expert receives disesteem payoffs if he/she votes in favor of an ill-fated innovation or votes against an innovation that proves to be beneficial. We find that the predictions of the model are sensitive to the signal technology. In the standard Condorcet framework experts' signals are i.i.d. conditional on the state of the world, implying that the state of the world is approximated with arbitrary precision by a sufficiently large number of signals. Under this assumption, any combination of disesteem payoffs leads to acceptance with too high a probability. However, if this assumption is relaxed, depending on the relative size of the disesteem payoffs the committee may accept or reject the innovation with too high a probability.

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