Over-Caution of Large Committees of Experts

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Blogs Publicados

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General

Serie

• Discussion Paper Series

Resumen

• In this paper, we demonstrate that payoffs linked to a committee member's individual vote may explain over-cautious behavior in committees. A committee of experts must decide whether to approve or reject a proposed innovation on behalf of society. In addition to a payoff linked to the adequateness of the committee's decision, each expert receives a disesteem payoff if he/she voted in favor of an ill-fated innovation. An example is FDA committees, where committee members can be exposed to a disesteem (negative) payoff if they vote to pass a drug that proves to be fatal for some users. We show that no matter how small the disesteem payoffs are, information aggregation fails in large committees: under any majority rule, the committee rejects the innovation almost surely. We then show that this inefficiency can be mitigated by pre-vote information pooling, but only if the decision is take under unanimity: in the presence of disesteem payoffs, committee members will only vote efficiently if they are all responsible for the final decision.

autores

• Rodríguez Barraquer, Tomás
• Midjord, Rune
• Valasek, Justin Mattias

fecha de publicación

• 2013-12

Área temática

• D71 - Elección social; Clubs; Comités; Asociaciones
• D72 - Procesos políticos: búsqueda de rentas económicas, cabildeo, elecciones, legislaturas y comportamiento de los votantes

Investigaciones

Líneas de investigación

• Committees
• Disesteem Payoffs
• Information Aggregation

Información Adicional

Issue

• dp654