Niall Hugues

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job market seminar

Niall Hugues

University of Warwick
How transparency kills information aggregation: Theory and experiment
Venue

VC Salle 205

Centre de la Vieille-Charité - Salle 205

Centre de la Vieille Charité
2 rue de la Charité
13002 Marseille

Date(s)
Monday, January 30 2017| 2:30pm to 4:00pm
Contact(s)

Cecilia Garcia-Peñalosa: cecilia.garcia-penalosa[at]univ-amu.fr

Abstract

We investigate the potential of transparency to influence committee decisionmaking. 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.