Preferences, Information and Incentives in Committee Decisions

委员会在集体决策中发挥关键作用，例如在国会和许多其他情况下（例如，董事会，大学，陪审团，体育裁判）：他们收集和报告信息，提出和选择政策。当委员会成员有不同的政策偏好和/或不同的信息时，在委员会决策过程中可能会出现严重的激励问题。在这种情况下，影响委员会有效决策的重要因素是什么？委员会应如何构建以促进决策？ 本研究项目将开发几个委员会决策的数学模型，以调查这些问题的各个方面。 第一种模式侧重于委员会的信息作用，在这种环境中，委员会成员可能会逃避收集信息，并可能歪曲其调查结果的报告，以操纵集体决策。 需要研究的问题包括决策中可以包含多少信息，以及最佳决策规则和最佳委员会规模。第二个模型关注的是最优的投票规则，委员会投票的政策建议，由代理人制定的，重点是权衡几个影响：（1）信息要求改变政策;（2）代理人的扭曲;（3）代理人的激励措施，以收集良好的信息。 在第三个模型中，讨价还价的方法是用来制定的想法，委员会的决策效率恶化与异质性的成员的利益，因为异质性使成员之间的妥协更加困难。该研究项目还将调查为什么在真实的世界委员会决策中很少观察到货币转移，而理论上它们可能非常有用，因为它们可以通过让赢家补偿输家来减少委员会决策的分配效应，从而使委员会能够专注于其决策的效率方面。了解委员会决策对于理解真实的世界制度和政策非常重要，并且可以提供建议以使委员会决策更有效。近年来，对委员会决策的研究已经扩大了其范围，以审查委员会决策的组织特征。该研究项目以现有文献为基础，试图对委员会组织结构的几个方面提供新的见解。研究结果可能对委员会规模、决策规则、投票规则、转让限制等产生理论和实践影响。

Committees play critical roles in collective decision-making such as in Congress and in many other situations (e.g., board of directors, universities, jury, sports judging): they gather and report information, propose and choose policies. Severe incentive problems may arise in the committee decision-making process when committee members have different policy preferences and/or different information. In such circumstances, what are the important factors affecting effective committee decision-making and how should committees be structured to facilitate it? This research project will develop several mathematical models of committee decisions to investigate various aspects of these questions. The first model focuses on the informational role of committees, in an environment where committee members may shirk in gathering information and may distort reports of their findings to manipulate collective decisions. Questions to study include how much information can be incorporated in the decisions and what is the optimal decision rule and optimal committee size. A second model is concerned with optimal voting rules for committees who vote on policy proposals developed by an agent, focusing on trade-offs among several effects: (1) information requirement for changing policies; (2) distortions by the agent; and (3) the agent's incentives to gather good information. In a third model, the bargaining approach is used to formulate the idea that efficiency of the committee's decision-making deteriorates with heterogeneity of its members' interests, because heterogeneity makes compromises among members more difficult. The research project will also investigate why monetary transfers are rarely observed in real world committee decisions, while theoretically they can be quite useful because they can reduce distribution effects of committee decisions by having winners compensate losers, thus enabling the committee to focus solely on the efficiency aspects of its decisions.Understanding committee decision-making is important for understanding real world institutions and policies, and may provide suggestions to make committee decision-making more effective. In recent years, research on committee decisions has broadened its scope to examine organizational features of committee decisions. This research project builds on the existing literature and tries to shed new light on several aspects of committee organizational structure. The results of the project may generate theoretical and practical implications on committee size, decision rules, voting rules, restrictions on transfers, etc.