Published December 2015
| public
Journal Article
Information transfer and aggregation in an uninformed committee: A model for the selection and use of biased expert advice
- Creators
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Plott, Charles R.
- Llewellyn, Morgan
Abstract
A committee of five uses majority rule for decisions on two public goods. Individual committee member preferences depend on a state of nature that is unknown to the committee members but the state of nature is known to two experts who have preferences about committee decisions. Experts have no vote on the committee but provide a recommendation to the committee at the opening of a meeting. Two experts who have known, opposing biases are selected – a dyadic mechanism. The results reveal that experts do not tell the truth but committee decisions are as if committee members know what the experts know. The information transfer occurs because committee members anticipate the biases and properly infer the information held by the experts.
Additional Information
Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. The financial support of the Caltech Laboratory for Experimental Economics and Political Science is gratefully acknowledged. The paper benefited from the comments of Rick Harbaugh and Alexander Hirsch and the insights of Meghana Bhatt, who as a student in a Caltech experimental economics class, conducted initial pilot experiments. The research and paper also benefited from the participants attending a conference on behavioral and experimental economics held at the University of California Santa Barbara in February 2006. Originally posted as Social Science Working Paper 1394 (Revised January, 2015).Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 99405
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20191023-104855044
- Caltech Laboratory for Experimental Economics and Political Science
- Created
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2019-10-23Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field