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 sourceof influence and voters is low, committee size is irrelevant and a small committee with theminimum number of just three voters generates the same probability of correct decisionmakingas any larger electorate. On the other hand, in settings with a high chance ofpreference misalignment, the smallest committee size needed to maximize this probabilityincreases with the precision of voters private signals.