How Transparency Kills Information Aggregation: Theory and Experiment
American Economic Journal: Microeconomics
vol. 10,
no. 1, February 2018
(pp. 181-209)
Abstract
We investigate the potential of transparency to influence committee decision-making. We present a model in which career concerned committee members receive private information of different type-dependent accuracy, deliberate, and vote. We study three levels of transparency under which career concerns are predicted to affect behavior differently and test the model's key predictions in a laboratory experiment. The model's predictions are largely borne out—transparency negatively affects information aggregation at the deliberation and voting stages, leading to sharply different committee error rates than under secrecy. This occurs despite subjects revealing more information under transparency than theory predicts.Citation
Fehrler, Sebastian, and Niall Hughes. 2018. "How Transparency Kills Information Aggregation: Theory and Experiment." American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 10 (1): 181-209. DOI: 10.1257/mic.20160046Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- C92 Design of Experiments: Laboratory, Group Behavior
- D72 Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
- D82 Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
- D83 Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
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