Corruption in Committees: An Experimental Study of Information Aggregation through Voting

Corruption in Committees: An Experimental Study of Information Aggregation through Voting

==noted by yinung==

此實驗的主題是委託專家決定的投票決策慣例是否正確!

這和我之前構想過的 committee (group) 決策行為之實驗有關

委員會中, 有專家和非專家。在專家公正的情況下,非專家棄權是正確的決定; 但若專家可能有 bias, 則非專家 (uninformed) 的投票可以抵消 biased 決策的形

Q1: 本文所提之 information efficiency 定義為何?

==引文==

Individuals often vote in situations where they have less than perfect information about the choices before them. Moreover, information is typically asymmetrically distributed, where somevoters have better knowledge about the choices than others.

專家委員會

one norm is to delegate to the so-called experts, the individuals who are known to have better information

關鍵投票 vote is pivotal, either forces a tie or breaks a tie.

無充分資訊的投票者亦導致不利結果

the uninformed voter’s participation has resulted in a worse outcome.

相關文獻

Feddersen and Pesendorfer (1996, 1999), in a seminal set of papers, pointed out that voters with low information levels should avoid this “swing voter’s curse " and rationally abstain, delegating the choice to fully informed voters.

Battaglini, Morton, and Palfrey (2008, 2010) Önd support for such “delegation through abstention."(以棄權方式來授權)

Using experiments, Morton and Tyran show that the equilibria with delegation through abstention are attractive to voters. Even when it is informationally efficient for all voters to participate, about half the time less informed voters abstain, delegating thedecision to more informed voters. (讓專業決定: let the experts decide)

Date:	2014-09-07
By:	Rebecca Morton (Department of Politics, New York University) Jean-Robert Tyran (Department of Economics, Copenhagen University)
URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:kud:kuiedp:1418&r=net
	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 (棄權?) 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.
Keywords:	Information aggregation, Voting, Asymmetric information, Swing voter’s curse
JEL:	C92 D71 D72 D81 D82

Patent Licensing Networks

Patent Licensing Networks

Date:	2014-09
By:	Doh-Shin Jeon (Toulouse School of Economics and CEPR) Yassine Lefouili (Toulouse School of Economics)
URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:net:wpaper:1416&r=net
	This paper investigates the patent licensing networks formed by competing firms. Assuming that licensing agreements can involve the payment of fixed fees only and that firms compete à la Cournot, we show that the complete network is always bilaterally efficient and that the monopoly network is bilaterally efficient if the patents are complementary enough. In the case of independent patents, we fully characterize the bilaterally efficient networks and find that when the cost reduction resulting from getting access to a competitor’s technology is large enough, the complete network is the only bilaterally efficient one. We also show that the bilaterally efficient networks can be sustained as subgame-perfect Nash equilibria with symmetric payoffs. This implies that the Pareto-dominance criterion selects the network that maximizes industry profits when more than one bilaterally efficient network exists.
Keywords:	Licensing; Networks; Antitrust and Intellectual Property
JEL:	L12 L13 L41

Strategic Disclosure of Demand Information by Duopolists: Theory and Experiment

Strategic Disclosure of Demand Information by Duopolists: Theory and Experiment

Date:	2014-09-01
By:	Jos Jansen (Department of Economics and Business, Aarhus University, Denmark) Andreas Pollak (University of Cologne)
URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:aah:aarhec:2014-20&r=net
	We study the strategic disclosure of demand information and product-market strategies of duopolists. In a setting where firms may fail to receive information, we show that firms selectively disclose information in equilibrium in order to influence their competitor’s product-market strategy. Subsequently, we analyze the firms’ behavior in a laboratory experiment. We find that subjects often use selective disclosure strategies, and this finding appears to be robust to changes in the information structure, the mode of competition, and the degree of product differentiation. Moreover, subjects in our experiment display product-market conduct that is largely consistent with theoretical predictions.
Keywords:	duopoly, Cournot competition, Bertrand competition, information disclosure, incomplete information, common value, product differentiation, asymmetry, skewed distribution, laboratory experiment
JEL:	C92 D22 D82 D83 L13 M4

Cobweb Theorems with Production Lags and Price Forecasting

Daniel Dufresne and Felisa Vázquez-Abad (2013). Cobweb Theorems with Production Lags and Price Forecasting. Economics: The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal, 7 (2013-23): 1—49. http://dx.doi.org/10.5018/economics-ejournal.ja.2013-23

[下載 PDF： Download (pdf, 800.8 kB)］(SSCI 期刊)

==noted by yinung==

這篇是理論性文章，數學用了不少，並不好讀。

生產落後期的例子: 挖礦 => 金屬生產
… An important aspect of mining is the lag between the time the decision to increase or decrease production
is made and the time the decision actually takes effect in the market. It takes several years for a planned new mine to start producing, …

主要研究發現：

Numerical Examples 1. l=落後期變長>=4, 價格波動變成發散

 

Numerical Examples 2. m=預期價格期數變長, 價格波動變成愈穩定

註: m =0 是典型 cobweb 理論, 即只用當期價格, 預測下一期價格

Numerical Examples 3. c= s/d =供給彈性/需求彈性, c 供需彈性比愈大, 價格波動愈不穩定

==original abstract==

(yinung 翻譯的)
在較長期的價格預測下，對價格有穩定作用。較長生產落後期並不會導致價格不穩。很長的生產落後期可導致波動之循環。

Abstract
The classical cobweb theorem is extended to include production lags and price forecasts. Price forecasting based on a longer period has a stabilizing effect on prices. Longer production lags do not necessarily lead to unstable prices; very long lags lead to cycles of constant amplitude. The classical cobweb requires elasticity of demand to be greater than that of supply; this is not necessarily the case in a more general setting. Random shocks are also considered.

==references==

* Chiarella (1988)studies a system where expected prices follow adaptive expectations, when the demand curve is linear, while the supply curve is non-linear…[The] paper shows that the system is either (1) stable, (2) unstable but cyclical, or (3) chaotic.

* Chiarella and He (2004). That paper studies the cobweb model from a slightly different point of view (in particular, the supply curve is a specific S-shaped function),

Efficient Competition through Cheap Talk: Competing Auctions and Competitive Search without Ex Ante Price

Efficient Competition through Cheap Talk: Competing Auctions and Competitive Search without Ex Ante Price

Date:	2013
By:	Kircher, Philipp Kim, Kyungmin
URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:edn:sirdps:532&r=net
	We consider a frictional two-sided matching market in which one side uses public cheap talk announcements so as to attract the other side. We show that if the first-price auction is adopted as the trading protocol, then cheap talk can be perfectly informative, and the resulting market outcome is efficient, constrained only by search frictions. We also show that the performance of an alternative trading protocol in the cheap-talk environment depends on the level of price dispersion generated by the protocol: If a trading protocol compresses (spreads) the distribution of prices relative to the first-price auction, then an efficient fully revealing equilibrium always (never) exists. Our results identify the settings in which cheap talk can serve as an efficient competitive instrument, in the sense that the central insights from the literature on competing auctions and competitive search continue to hold unaltered even without ex ante price commitment.
Keywords:	Directed search, competitive search, commitment, cheap talk,

Strategic Disclosure of Demand Information by Duopolists: Theory and Experiment

Strategic Disclosure of Demand Information by Duopolists: Theory and Experiment

Date:	2014-09-01
By:	Jos Jansen Andreas Pollak
URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:kls:series:0075&r=net
	We study the strategic disclosure of demand information and product-market strategies of duopolists. In a setting where firms may fail to receive information, we show that firms selectively disclose information in equilibrium in order to influence their competitor’s product-market strategy. Subsequently, we analyze the firms’ behavior in a laboratory experiment. We find that subjects often use selective disclosure strategies, and this finding appears to be robust to changes in the information structure, the mode of competition, and the degree of product differentiation. Moreover, subjects in our experiment display product-market conduct that is largely consistent with theoretical predictions.
Keywords:	duopoly, Cournot competition, Bertrand competition, information disclosure, incomplete information, common value, product differentiation, asymmetry, skewed distribution, laboratory experiment
JEL:	C92 D22 D82 D83 L13 M4

The Impact of Information Provision on Agglomeration Bonus Performance: An Experimental Study on Local Networks

The Impact of Information Provision on Agglomeration Bonus Performance: An Experimental Study on Local Networks

Date:	2013
By:	Banerjee, Simanti de Vries, Frans P. Hanley, Nick van Soest, Daan
URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:edn:sirdps:570&r=net
	The Agglomeration Bonus (AB) is a mechanism to induce adjacent landowners to spatially coordinate their land use for the delivery of ecosystem services from farmland. This paper uses laboratory experiments to explore the performance of the AB in achieving the socially optimal land management configuration in a local network environment where the information available to subjects varies. The AB poses a coordination problem between two Nash equilibria: a Pareto dominant and a risk dominant equilibrium. The experiments indicate that if subjects are informed about both their direct and indirect neighbors’ actions, they are more likely to coordinate on the Pareto dominant equilibrium relative to the case where subjects have information about their direct neighbors’ action only. However, the extra information can only delay – and not prevent – the transition to the socially inferior risk dominant Nash equilibrium. In the long run, the AB mechanism may only be partially effective in enhancing delivery of ecosystem services on farming landscapes featuring local networks.
Keywords:	Agglomeration bonus, agri-environment schemes, biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services, information spillovers, Payments for Ecosystem Services, spatial coordination,