How Transparency Kills Information Aggregation Theory and Experiment

We investigate the potential of transparency to influence committee decision-making. We present a model in which career concerned committee members receive private information of different type-dependent accuracy, deliberate, and vote. We study three levels of transparency under which career concern...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inAmerican economic journal. Microeconomics Vol. 10; no. 1; pp. 181 - 209
Main Authors Fehrler, Sebastian, Hughes, Niall
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Pittsburgh American Economic Association 01.02.2018
AEA
Subjects
Committees
Decision making
Economic models
Information
Transparency
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Summary:We investigate the potential of transparency to influence committee decision-making. We present a model in which career concerned committee members receive private information of different type-dependent accuracy, deliberate, and vote. We study three levels of transparency under which career concerns are predicted to affect behavior differently and test the model’s key predictions in a laboratory experiment. The model’s predictions are largely borne out—transparency negatively affects information aggregation at the deliberation and voting stages, leading to sharply different committee error rates than under secrecy. This occurs despite subjects revealing more information under transparency than theory predicts.
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ISSN:1945-7669
1945-7685
DOI:10.1257/mic.20160046