Three Essays in Collective Decision Making

Three Essays in Collective Decision Making
Author: Niall Hughes
Publisher:
Total Pages: 109
Release: 2013
Genre: Elections
ISBN:

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This thesis is a collection of three essays on voting as a means of collective decision- making. The first chapter builds a model of how voters should optimally behave in a legislative election with three parties under plurality rule. I show that, in contrast to single district elections, properties such as polarisation and misaligned voting can be mitigated in legislative elections. The second chapter studies a model of committee decision making where members have career concerns and a principal can choose the level of transparency (how much of the committees decision he can observe). We show that increased transparency leads to a breakdown in information aggregation, but that this may actually increase the principal's payoff. The theoretical model is then tested in a laboratory experiment. The final chapter introduces a model of legislative bargaining where three parties in the legislature bargain over the formation of government by choosing a policy and a distribution of government perks. I show that when individual politicians are responsible for the policies they implement - that is, those outside of government are not held accountable by voters for the implemented governments policies, while each individual politician in the ruling coalition is - then a given seat distribution can result in almost any two party coalition.

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions
Author: Dino Dominic Falaschetti
Publisher:
Total Pages: 236
Release: 1999
Genre:
ISBN:

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Three Essays on Decision-making in Natural Resource Economics

Three Essays on Decision-making in Natural Resource Economics
Author: Michael Patrick Brady
Publisher:
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2007
Genre: Agricultural innovations
ISBN:

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Abstract: The first two chapters look at differences between individual and group decision-making in economic environments. Using laboratory experiments the first chapter shows that group preferences for self-interest differ from those of individuals, but the direction and magnitude depends on the procedure governing how groups make decisions. The second chapter looks at the dynamics of group decision-making, which leads to an argument for looking at group decisions through the lens of reciprocity. The third chapter focuses on country level trends in agriculture to empirically investigate whether countries that increase agricultural productivity increase or decrease land in agriculture.

Three Essays on Information Transmission and Pooling in Common Value Decision Making

Three Essays on Information Transmission and Pooling in Common Value Decision Making
Author: John P. Lightle
Publisher:
Total Pages: 131
Release: 2008
Genre: Group decision making
ISBN:

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Abstract: My first essay reexamines experimental results suggesting that pooling of information by decision making groups is often incomplete, leading to a suboptimal decision. In my main experimental treatment, I calibrate decision makers' information load so that discovering the optimal choice is likely, given natural memory constraints. However, I show that errors recalling public information are typically mitigated by within-group correction, while comparable errors with private information cannot be corrected, biasing the pool of information toward the option favored by public information. This "corrective force bias" accounts for the majority of sub-optimal group decisions in my experiment. This bias is unacknowledged in prior experiments, and suggests that the observed information pooling failures have more to do with the structure of the information distribution than any inadequacies in group performance. In my second essay, I provide a theoretical model which illustrates why experts advising a decision maker (DM) with a limited ability to process information might rationally bias their messages toward the policy they believe to be correct when the advisors' and DM's interests are aligned. In the most informative perfect Bayesian equilibrium of a game where advice is given sequentially, the first advisor sends a sincere message if his information is moderate. However, given information sufficiently favorable to a policy, advisor 1 biases his message in an attempt to ensure this policy is chosen even when the DM receives a noisy message. I describe this bias in the transmission of information as "paternalistic bias." My research suggests that the ex-post evaluation of the precision of experts should account for this paternalistic bias. My third essay describes a rational choice model for a behavioral phenomenon known as biased recall, i.e., the fact that information which is consistent with an initial preference, expectation, or belief is more likely to be recalled. The model I provide is the first to endogenize the recall of information and ascribe utility functions to agents in order to solve for the optimal allocation of limited memory resources.