Asymmetric Information and the Coherence of Legislation

1987 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 897-918 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Austen-Smith ◽  
William H. Riker

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.

Author(s):  
Shmuel Nitzan ◽  
Jacob Paroush

Issues related to collective decision making and to Condorcet jury theorems have been studied and publicly discussed for over two hundred years. Recently, there is a burgeoning interest in the topic by academicians as well as practitioners in the fields of Law, Economics, Political Science, and Psychology. Typical questions are: What is the optimal size of a panel of decision makers such as a jury, a political committee, or a board of directors? Which decision rule to utilize? Who should be the members of the team, representatives or professionals? What is the effect of strategic behaviour, group dynamics, conflict of interests, free riding, social interactions, and personal interdependencies on the final collective decision? This article presents current thinking in the field, offers suggestions for further research, and alludes to possible future developments regarding public choice and collective decision making.


2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 68-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Krakowski

The paper examines conditions under which communities threatened by armed groups amid the Colombian civil war are most likely to resist displacement. Using a game-theoretic framework and quantitative data, the paper shows that the threatened communities which expect rescue from an armed actor are more likely to resist displacement than those communities which expect no help. Community cohesion has a dual effect on displacement. The amount of peer support among community members reduces their chances to resist displacement, but the extent to which community members are involved in collective decision-making processes makes them less likely to displace. These findings reveal that both displaced communities and those that resisted displacement possess crucial social resources for their post-conflict recovery and development, such as cohesion and strong bonds of solidarity. The paper stresses the importance of local-level organisation coordinating collective decision-making to guarantee the most efficient use of these resources.


2021 ◽  
Vol 006 (01) ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Muslimin Muslimin ◽  
Yuli Andi Gani ◽  
Suryadi Suryadi ◽  
Choirul Saleh

This article was written based on the findings of research that examines the process of formation of collective leadership implemented by the Corruption Eradication Commission (Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi: KPK) in Indonesia during its inception in 2003 until the end of the leadership of Abraham Samad 2015. The results of the study indicate that the KPK's collective leadership was gradually formed through several stages can be identified in 3 development cycles. The first stage is a pioneering cycle that requires prerequisites for the formation of collective leadership in order to operate the leadership mechanism in the KPK's organizational structure. Second, the critical cycle, namely the operational trials of collective leadership that have the opportunity to succeed or fail. This cycle is characterized by collaboration between structures in the collective decision making process. Third, the operational stabilization cycle, is a stage of development that leads to the cohesiveness of KPK members and results in superior level of performance.


Author(s):  
Thea Van der Westhuizen ◽  
Max Mkhonta

Co-engagement of organisation leadership in collective decision-making is recognised as a key modality for encouragement of collective creativity as well as responsible and sustainable business practices. In cases of public enterprise (PE) collective decision-making regarding organisational policy is necessary for organisation leadership to co-engage with key decision-makers in government to ensure responsible and sustainable execution of policy. Often policy-making and implementation allows little scope for innovation and creativity, in other words, for flexibility, with direct consequences for success or failure of collaboration. This chapter explores key inferences such as the need for creative strategic intent; need for co-engagement; need for responsible and sustainable business practices to build morale and the need for innovate approach to policy-making.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
DIEGO WERNECK ARGUELHES ◽  
LEANDRO MOLHANO RIBEIRO

Abstract:Collective decision-making is often taken as an ‘institutional fact’ when it comes to supreme and constitutional courts. In this article, we focus on the example of the Brazilian Supreme Court (Supremo Tribunal Federal, or STF) to argue that this feature should not be assumed from the outset, as it does not necessarily hold, across countries, for all relevant powers that courts may have. As this example illustrates, the assignment to individual Justices of three distinct powers, namely agenda setting, position taking, and decision making, can have profound effects on the legislative status quo outside the court, amounting in some circumstances to a form of individual judicial review. This expanded typology of court powers both points to an underexplored spectrum for comparing different courts and makes it necessary to discuss if and how particular distributions of such powers within multi-member courts are normatively justified. In the specific case of the STF, we argue that the specific combination of individual allocations of agenda setting and decision-making powers, which gives rise in practice to the possibility of individual judicial review, cannot be reconciled with basic tenets of constitutional theory.


Author(s):  
Diego Werneck Arguelhes ◽  
Leandro Molhano Ribeiro

Resumo: Estudos e críticas à participação do Supremo Tribunal Federal na vida política nacional costumam assumir, ainda que implicitamente, que a decisão do tribunal a ser analisada ou criticada é obtida após um processo decisório interno colegiado. Mesmo que esse processo seja imperfeito, ele é visto como condição necessária para que os inputs individuais dos Ministros possam produzir efeitos relevantes sobre o mundo fora do tribunal. Neste trabalho, mostramos que os Ministros do STF podem agir individualmente, sem passar pelo colegiado, de modo a produzir efeitos sobre o comportamento de atores externos ao tribunal. Mapeamos conceitualmente esse tipo de poder individual, a partir de um marco teórico da análise institucional, para então identificar alguns exemplos na prática decisória do tribunal: a antecipação de posições na imprensa, o uso de pedidos de vista de longa duração e o uso de decisões monocráticas para avançar posições jurisprudenciais. Com base nesses três exemplos, apontamos e discutimos algumas implicações da existência desses poderes individuais para estudos sobre judicialização da política e comportamento judicial. Em especial, destacamos os problemas normativos que surgem quando se reconhece a possibilidade de que uma ação judicial internamente minoritária (isto é, uma ação que não expressa a preferência da maioria dos Ministros) produza resultados externamente contramajoritários.Palavras-chave: Supremo Tribunal Federal; Poderes Individuais; Comportamento Judicial; Processo Decisório; Análise Institucional.                                               Abstract: Existing studies on the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court tend to assume, even if implicitly, that decisions they analyze are the outcome of an internal, collective decision-making process. Even when this process is criticized as problematic in itself, it is seen as a necessary condition for the Justices’ individual preferences to have an actual impact in the outside world. In this paper, we show that the Justices have resources to act individually, bypassing the collective decision-making procedures, in ways that can and do influence the behavior of actors outside the Court. We conceptualize such individual powers within a framework of institutional analysis, and we identify a set of examples in the Court’s decision-making practices: using press statements to announce one’s judicial preferences, as they would be expressed in a future judicial opinion; individual requests to study the case files in order to prevent the Court from deciding it (pedidos de vista); and the strategic use of and reference to individual rulings (decisões monocráticas) to advance one’s individual jurisprudential views. These three examples allow us to discuss some of the implications of these individual powers for the literature on judicial politics. In particular, these powers are normatively problematic if they allow a position that is in the minority within the Court to create counter-majoritarian outcomes outside the Court.Keywords: Supreme Federal Court, Individual Powers, Judicial Behavior, Decision-Making Process, Institutional Analysis.


Author(s):  
Simon Buckingham Shum ◽  
Lorella Cannavacciuolo ◽  
Anna De Liddo ◽  
Luca Iandoli ◽  
Ivana Quinto

Current traditional technologies, while enabling effective knowledge sharing and accumulation, seem to be less supportive of knowledge organization, use and consensus formation, as well as of collaborative decision making process. To address these limitations and thus to better foster collective decision-making around complex and controversial problems, a new family of tools is emerging able to support more structured knowledge representations known as collaborative argument mapping tools. This paper argues that online collaborative argumentation has the rather unique feature of combining knowledge organization with social mapping and that such a combination can provide interesting insights on the social processes activated within a collaborative decision making initiative. In particular, the authors investigate how Social Network Analysis can be used for the analysis of the collective argumentation process to study the structural properties of the concepts and social networks emerging from users’ interaction. Using Cohere, an online platform designed to support collaborative argumentation, some empirical findings obtained from two use cases are presented.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1420-1433
Author(s):  
Thea Van der Westhuizen ◽  
Max Mkhonta

Co-engagement of organisation leadership in collective decision-making is recognised as a key modality for encouragement of collective creativity as well as responsible and sustainable business practices. In cases of public enterprise (PE) collective decision-making regarding organisational policy is necessary for organisation leadership to co-engage with key decision-makers in government to ensure responsible and sustainable execution of policy. Often policy-making and implementation allows little scope for innovation and creativity, in other words, for flexibility, with direct consequences for success or failure of collaboration. This chapter explores key inferences such as the need for creative strategic intent; need for co-engagement; need for responsible and sustainable business practices to build morale and the need for innovate approach to policy-making.


2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Buckingham Shum ◽  
Lorella Cannavacciuolo ◽  
Anna De Liddo ◽  
Luca Iandoli ◽  
Ivana Quinto

Current traditional technologies, while enabling effective knowledge sharing and accumulation, seem to be less supportive of knowledge organization, use and consensus formation, as well as of collaborative decision making process. To address these limitations and thus to better foster collective decision-making around complex and controversial problems, a new family of tools is emerging able to support more structured knowledge representations known as collaborative argument mapping tools. This paper argues that online collaborative argumentation has the rather unique feature of combining knowledge organization with social mapping and that such a combination can provide interesting insights on the social processes activated within a collaborative decision making initiative. In particular, the authors investigate how Social Network Analysis can be used for the analysis of the collective argumentation process to study the structural properties of the concepts and social networks emerging from users’ interaction. Using Cohere, an online platform designed to support collaborative argumentation, some empirical findings obtained from two use cases are presented.


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