TY - JOUR
T1 - Committee design with endogenous information
AU - Persico, Nicola
N1 - Funding Information:
As n becomes large the term in curly brackets converges to the negative number −2 + (1/p), while the term outside brackets goes to infinity. This large negative term will dominate the derivative of the marginal incentive to stay informed. Thus, for large n the marginal incentive to stay informed is decreasing in p, as was to be shown. ‖ Acknowledgements. I am grateful to Alessando Lizzeri for encouragement. Mark Armstrong and two anonymous referees have made many helpful observations. Financial support from the National Science Foundation under grant SBR 9905564 is gratefully acknowledged.
PY - 2004/1
Y1 - 2004/1
N2 - Identical agents gather costly information, and then aggregate it through voting. Because information is a public good, information is underprovided relative to the social optimum. A "good" voting rule must give incentives to acquire information, as well as aggregate information efficiently. A voting rule that requires a large plurality (in the extreme, unanimity) to upset the status quo can be optimal only if the information available to each agent is sufficiently accurate. This result is independent of the preferences of voters and of the cost of information.
AB - Identical agents gather costly information, and then aggregate it through voting. Because information is a public good, information is underprovided relative to the social optimum. A "good" voting rule must give incentives to acquire information, as well as aggregate information efficiently. A voting rule that requires a large plurality (in the extreme, unanimity) to upset the status quo can be optimal only if the information available to each agent is sufficiently accurate. This result is independent of the preferences of voters and of the cost of information.
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U2 - 10.1111/0034-6527.00280
DO - 10.1111/0034-6527.00280
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0842269255
SN - 0034-6527
VL - 71
SP - 165
EP - 191
JO - Review of Economic Studies
JF - Review of Economic Studies
IS - 1
ER -