On Two-Period Committee Voting: Why Straw Polls Should Have Consequences

Arbeitspapier

We consider a committee voting setup with two rounds of voting where committee members, who possess private information about the state of the world, have to make a binary decision. We investigate incentives for truthful revelation of their information in the first voting period. Coughlan (2000) shows that members reveal their information in a straw poll only if their preferences are in fact homogeneous. By taking costs of time into account, we demonstrate that committees have strictly higher incentives to reveal information if a decision can be made for high levels of consensus in the straw poll already. In such scenarios, members of all homogeneous and some heterogeneous juries are strictly better off when the requirement for early decisions is chosen carefully.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: Bonn Econ Discussion Papers ; No. 04/2015

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior ; Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design ; Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
• Subject: Communication ; Committees ; Voting

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Frommeyer, Tim Julius
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): University of Bonn, Bonn Graduate School of Economics (BGSE)
• (where): Bonn
• (when): 2015

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/128619
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:43 AM CET