scholarly journals The Perverse Consequences of Policy Restrictions in the Presence of Asymmetric Information

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-425 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rafael Hortala-Vallve ◽  
Valentino Larcinese
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Fiscal Policy ◽  
Asymmetric Information ◽  
Numerical Simulations ◽  
Time Inconsistency ◽  
Political Information ◽  
Institutional Constraints ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Policy Options ◽  
Coordination Failures

Institutions have the power to limit a government’s policy options. Policy restrictions are often used as solutions to coordination failures or time inconsistency problems. However, policy constraints can have significant drawbacks and these disadvantages have, to date, been overlooked in the literature. When institutional constraints tie a government’s hands, citizens will have less incentive to become informed about politics and participate in collective decision-making. This is because policy restrictions lower the private returns of political information. A fiscal policy restriction, for example, may decrease redistribution by lowering a poorer voters’ acquisition of political information. We illustrate our theoretical findings with numerical simulations and find that in one in three cases these policy restrictions make poorer voters worse off.

Asymmetric Information and the Coherence of Legislation

1987 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 897-918 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Austen-Smith ◽  
William H. Riker
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Asymmetric Information ◽  
Private Information ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Decision Making Process ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Committee Decision ◽  
Game Theoretic

Legislators' beliefs, preferences, and intentions are communicated in committees and legislatures through debates, the proposal of bills and amendments, and the recording of votes. Because such information is typically distributed asymmetrically within any group of decision makers, legislators have incentives to reveal or conceal private information strategically and thus manipulate the collective decision-making process in their favor. In consequence, any committee decision may in the end reflect only the interests of a minority. We address a problem of sharing information through debate in an endogenous, agenda-setting, collective-choice process. The model is game theoretic and we find in the equilibrium to the game that at least some legislators have incentives to conceal private information. Consequently, the final committee decision can be “incoherent” by failing to reflect the preferences of all committee members fully. Additionally, we characterize the subset of legislators with any incentive to conceal data.

Islands of Stability: Engaging Emergence from Cellular Automata to the Occupy Movement

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Pickering
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Cellular Automata ◽  
Black Box ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Occupy Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

"Instead of considering »being with« in terms of non-problematic, machine-like places, where reliable entities assemble in stable relationships, STS conjures up a world where the achievement of chancy stabilisations and synchronisations is local.We have to analyse how and where a certain regularity and predictability in the intersection of scientists and their instruments, say, or of human individuals and groups, is produced.The paper reviews models of emergence drawn from the history of cybernetics—the canonical »black box,« homeostats, and cellular automata—to enrich our imagination of the stabilisation process, and discusses the concept of »variety« as a way of clarifying its difficulty, with the antiuniversities of the 1960s and the Occupy movement as examples. Failures of »being with« are expectable. In conclusion, the paper reviews approaches to collective decision-making that reduce variety without imposing a neoliberal hierarchy. "

Making the most of individual differences in joint decisions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bahador Bahrami
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Direct Evidence ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Wisdom Of Crowds ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
Adaptive Value ◽  
Joint Decisions ◽  
Cultural Data ◽  
Better Than

Evidence for and against the idea that “two heads are better than one” is abundant. This chapter considers the contextual conditions and social norms that predict madness or wisdom of crowds to identify the adaptive value of collective decision-making beyond increased accuracy. Similarity of competence among members of a collective impacts collective accuracy, but interacting individuals often seem to operate under the assumption that they are equally competent even when direct evidence suggest the opposite and dyadic performance suffers. Cross-cultural data from Iran, China, and Denmark support this assumption of similarity (i.e., equality bias) as a sensible heuristic that works most of the time and simplifies social interaction. Crowds often trade off accuracy for other collective benefits such as diffusion of responsibility and reduction of regret. Consequently, two heads are sometimes better than one, but no-one holds the collective accountable, not even for the most disastrous of outcomes.

Corruption and Anticorruption in Democratic Athens

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Participatory Democracy ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Civic Culture ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Alexander The Great ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Individual Judgment ◽  
Collective Judgment ◽  
Hidden Knowledge

The chapter examines a major corruption scandal that involved the Athenian orator Demosthenes and an official of Alexander the Great. This episode reveals how tensions between individual and collective decision-making practices shaped Athenian understandings of corruption and anticorruption. The various and multiple anticorruption measures of Athens sought to bring ‘hidden’ knowledge into the open and thereby remove information from the realm of individual judgment, placing it instead into the realm of collective judgment. The Athenian experience therefore suggests that participatory democracy, and a civic culture that fosters political equality rather than reliance on individual expertise, provides a key bulwark against corruption.

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