Information Aggregation by Council

Le Lemma organise un séminaire, sur le thème « Information Aggregation by Council   » le mardi 10 juin à 11h. 

Nikolas TSAKAS (University of Cyprus), en collaboration avec Dimitrios XEFTERIS

Résumé : 

We compare the information aggregation efficiency of a small deliberative council to that of a large majority-based electorate in a society of truth-seeking individuals facing a binary collective decision. While the electorate possesses more information than the council, the latter proves to be substantially more effective than the former when information aggregation is a complex task, and only slightly less so when it is a simple/additive endeavour. Moreover, in contrast to the typical emergence of strategic/non-truthful voting in large elections, truth-telling is essentially the only viable equilibrium behavior in councils. Our findings offer a novel rationale for the prevalence of representative democracies, favoring small deliberative bodies over large electorates.