Template-Type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0
Title: Voting to Persuade
Author-Name: Tsz-Ning Wong
Author-Email: wong@uni-mannheim.de
Author-Name: Lily Ling Yang
Author-Email: lily.yang@uni-mannheim.de
Author-Name: Xin Zhao
Author-Email: xin.zhao85@uibe.edu.cn
Classification-JEL:  D71, D72, D83
Keywords: Advisory committee, Persuasion, Voting


Abstract: We consider a model of collective persuasion, in which members of an advisory committee
receive private continuous signals and then vote on a policy change. A decision maker then
decides whether to adopt the change upon observing each vote. Information transmission
between the committee and the decision maker is possible if and only if there exists an infor-
mative equilibrium with the unanimity rule. When the decision maker is more conservative,
a higher level of consensus is needed to persuade her to abandon the status quo in equilib-
rium. Our result thus provide a rationale for the use of the unanimity rule, despite its poor
performance in information aggregation (Feddersen and Pesendorfer 1998). Furthermore, the
continuous-signal model considered in this paper produces results that contrast the discrete-signal model considered in the literature (Battaglini 2017; Gradwohl and Feddersen 2018) and
we discuss how the results depend on the coarseness of the signal structure.

Note: 
Length: 49
Creation-Date: 2022-06
Revision-Date: 
File-URL: https://www.crctr224.de/research/discussion-papers/archive/dp354
File-Format: application/pdf
Handle: RePEc:bon:boncrc:CRCTR224_2022_354