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Information acquisition and voting with heterogeneous experts
Author(s) -
Tan Xu,
Wen Quan
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
the rand journal of economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.687
H-Index - 108
eISSN - 1756-2171
pISSN - 0741-6261
DOI - 10.1111/1756-2171.12350
Subject(s) - social planner , voting , majority rule , mechanism (biology) , flexibility (engineering) , social welfare , social choice theory , planner , microeconomics , preference , welfare , computer science , simple (philosophy) , economics , artificial intelligence , political science , market economy , philosophy , management , epistemology , politics , law
A social planner selects heterogeneously biased experts to (either sequentially or simultaneously) acquire costly signals, and then agents vote between two alternatives. To maximize social welfare, the social planner adopts an alternating mechanism —choosing extremely biased experts whose preferences oppose the pivotal voter's current preference—in the optimal sequential mechanism, whereas she chooses mildly biased experts in the optimal simultaneous mechanism. Despite the flexibility of a sequential mechanism, the optimal simultaneous mechanism can achieve strictly higher social welfare when information cost is low. Supermajority rules can dominate simple majority rule in terms of both information acquisition and social welfare.