Corruption in Committees

Autor(en)

Rebecca Morton, Jean-Robert Tyran

Abstrakt

We investigate experimentally the effects of corrupt experts on information aggregation in committees. We find that non-experts are significantly less likely to delegate through abstention when there is a probability that experts are corrupt. Such decreased abstention, when the probability of corrupt experts is low, actually increases information efficiency in committee decision-making. However, if the probability of corrupt experts is large, the effect is not sufficient to offset the mechanical effect of decreased information efficiency due to corrupt experts. Our results demonstrate that the norm of “letting the expert decide” in committee voting is influenced by the probability of corrupt experts, and that influence
can have, to a limited extent, a positive effect on information efficiency.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Volkswirtschaftslehre, Wiener Zentrum für Experimentelle Wirtschaftsforschung

Externe Organisation(en)

New York University

Band

No. 14-18

Anzahl der Seiten

44

Publikationsdatum

09-2014

ÖFOS 2012

502024 Öffentliche Wirtschaft

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/4dba1a21-7a35-4799-8055-9e213252d8c9