Template-Type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0
Title: On Two-Period Committee Voting: Why Straw Polls Should Have Consequences
Author-Name: Tim Julius Frommeyer
Author-Email: timfrommeyer@uni-bonn.de
Classification-JEL: D72, D82, D83
Keywords: Communication, Committees, Voting

Abstract: 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.

Note: 
Length: 29
Creation-Date: 2015-04
Revision-Date: 
File-URL: http://www.wiwi.uni-bonn.de/bgsepapers/bonedp/bgse04_2015.pdf  
File-Format: application/pdf
Handle: RePEc:bon:bonedp:bgse04_2015