Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/111248 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2015
Series/Report no.: 
Working Paper No. 191
Publisher: 
University of Zurich, Department of Economics, Zurich
Abstract: 
We study the effect of public information on collective decision-making in a committee with members of both common and conflicting interests. We show that the set of preferences that allow for the existence of an informative voting equilibrium can be heavily restricted by the presence of a public signal, regardless of the size of the committee and the choice of the voting threshold value. What's worse, the presence of the public information introduces an inefficient equilibrium which robustly exists across different voting rules. To mitigate the harmful effect of the public information, we propose to use a class of more flexible voting rules, whose threshold values depend on both the precision and the realization of the public signal, that may restore the informative voting equilibrium. In particular, in a standard setting with common interest agents, the contingent voting rule that we construct not only always restores the informative voting equilibrium but also achieves full informational efficiency.
Subjects: 
strategic voting
collective decision-making
public information
committee design
optimal voting rule
JEL: 
D72
D82
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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