Size of Committees Under Outside Influence

Saptarshi P. Ghosh, Peter Postl, Jaideep Roy

Abstract: The paper studies the impact of biased influence on the returns from increasing the sizeof a committee. We show that when the chance of preference misalignment between source of influence and voters is low, committee size is irrelevant and a small committee with the minimum number of just three voters generates the same probability of correct decision making as any larger electorate. On the other hand, in settings with a high chance of preference misalignment, the smallest committee size needed to maximize this probability increases with the precision of voters private signals.

File: SNUECON_WP2015_001.pdf