Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Economics

PDF

hao li

Selected Works

2001

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Conflicts And Common Interests In Committees , Hao Li, Sherwin Rosen, Wing Suen Dec 2001

Conflicts And Common Interests In Committees , Hao Li, Sherwin Rosen, Wing Suen

hao li

Committees improve decisions by pooling independent information of members, but promote manipulation, obfuscation, and exaggeration of private evidence when members have conflicting preferences. We study how self-interest mediates these conflicting forces. When members' preferences differ, no person ever submits a report that allows perfect inference of his private information. Instead, equilibrium strategies are many-to-one mappings that transform continuous data into ordered ranks: voting procedures are the equilibrium methods of achieving a consensus in committees. Voting necessarily coarsens the transmission of information among members, but is necessary to control conflicts of interest. The degree of coarseness of the equilibrium voting procedure …


A Theory Of Conservatism, Hao Li May 2001

A Theory Of Conservatism, Hao Li

hao li

A free-rider problem arises in a group when a public decision between two alternatives must be made based on privately collected evidence, leading to insufficient effort in gathering evidence and ex ante welfare loss for the group. To alleviate the free-rider problem, the group can commit to a "conservative'' rule whereby the decision is made against the alternative favored by the group's preference or prior when evidence supports the alternative but is not preponderant. For example, if a recruitment committee is biased toward making an offer to a job candidate, either because the committee is more concerned with wrongful rejection …