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Committee decision making is examined in this study focusing on the role assigned to the committee members. In particular, we are concerned about the comparison between committee performance under specialization and non-specialization of the decision makers.

Leaks are pervasive in politics. Hence, many committees that nominally operate under secrecy de facto operate under the threat that information might be passed on to outsiders. We study theoretically and experimentally how this possibility affects the behavior of committee members and the decision-making accuracy. Our theoretical analysis generates two major predictions. First, a committee operating under the threat of leaks is equivalent to a formally transparent committee in terms of the probabilities of project implementation as well as welfare (despite differences in individual voting behavior). Second, the threat of leaks causes a committee to recommend rejection of a project whenever precise information has been shared among committee members. As a consequence, a status-quo bias arises. Our laboratory results confirm these predictions despite subjects communicating less strategically than predicted.

In this paper, we study committee decision making process using game theory. By a committee, we mean any group of people who have to pick one option from a given set of alternatives. A well defined voting rule is specified by which the committee arrives at a decision. Each member has a preference relation on the set of alternatives. A new solution concept called the one-core in introduced and studied. Intuitively, the one-core consists of all maximal (for the proposer) proposals which are undominated assuming that the player who makes the proposal does not cooperate in any effort to dominate the proposal. For games with non-empty cores, the one-core proposals are shown to be better than the core. For games with empty cores, the one-core proposals tend to be pessimistic, i.e., they indicate the security levels of the players. This is because the stability requirements of the one-core are too strong for such games. A bargaining set modeled along the lines of the Aumann-Maschler bargaining set for characteristic function games is defined for committee games. Because of its relaxed stability requirements, the bargaining set indicates more reasonable proposals than the one-core. The existence of both the one-core and the bargaining set are studied and these concepts are compared with two other well known solution concepts--the core and the Condorcet solution.

International audience ; Committees of national officials play a major role in the decision-making of the European Union's main legislative body, the Council of Ministers. The study investigates the conditions under which bureaucrats decide on legislative dossiers without direct involvement of ministers. A statistical analysis is performed to examine this question, using an original data set of 439 legislative proposals. The results of the analysis indicate that formal institutional features such as the voting rule in the Council and the involvement of the European Parliament affect committee decision-making, whereas no effects of committee socialization and preference divergence among member states are identified. The results diminish concerns about the democratic legitimacy of Council decision-making to some extent, as the findings demonstrate that bureaucrats tend to decide only the less salient and more complex proposals.

Transparent decision-making processes are widely regarded as a prerequisite for the working of a representative democracy. It facilitates accountability, and citizens may suspect that decisions, if taken behind closed doors, do not promote their interests. Why else the secrecy? We provide a model of committee decision-making that explains the public's demand for transparency, and committee members' aversion to it. In line with case study evidence, we show how pressures to become transparent induce committee members to organize pre-meetings away from the public eye. Outcomes of pre-meetings are less determined, more anarchic, than those of formal meetings, but within bounds. We characterize feasible deals that are credible and will be endorsed in the formal meeting.

Transparent decision-making processes are widely regarded as a prerequisite for the working of a representative democracy. It facilitates accountability, and citizens may suspect that decisions, if taken behind closed doors, do not promote their interests. Why else the secrecy? We provide a model of committee decision-making that explains the public's demand for transparency, and committee members' aversion to it. In line with case study evidence, we show how pressures to become transparent induce committee members to organize pre-meetings away from the public eye. Outcomes of pre-meetings are less determined, more anarchic, than those of formal meetings, but within bounds. We characterize feasible deals that are credible and will be endorsed in the formal meeting.

As mentioned in the introduction, the objective of this work has been to get a more realistic understanding of economic decision making processes by adopting an interdisciplinary approach which takes into consideration at the same time economic and psychological issues. The research in particular has been focused on the psychological concept of categorization, which in the standard economic theory has received until now no attention, and on its implications for decision making. The three experimental studies conducted in this work provide empirical evidence that individuals don not behave according to the perfect rationality and maximization assumptions which underly the SEUT, but rather as bounded rational satisfiers who try to simplify the decision problems they face through the process of categorization. The results of the first experimental study, on bilateral integrative negotiation, show that most of the people categorize a continuum of outcomes in two categories (satisfying/not satisfying), and treat all the options within each category as equivalent. This process of categorization leads the negotiators to make suboptimal agreements and to what I call the ?Zone of Agreement Bias? (ZAB). The experimental study on committees? decision making with logrolling provides evidence of how the categorization of outcomes in satisfying/not satisfying can affect the process of coalition formation in multi-issue decisions. In the first experiment, involving 3-issues and 3-parties decisions under majority rule, the categorization of outcomes leads most of the individuals to form suboptimal coalitions and make Pareto-dominated agreements. The second experiment, aimed at comparing the suboptimizing effect of categorization under majority and unanimity rule, shows that the unanimity rule can lead to a much higher rate of optimal agreements than the majority rule. The third experiment, involving 4-issues and 4-parties decisions provides evidence that the results of experiments 1 and 2 hold even when the level of complexity of the decision problem increases.

Ethical evaluation of projects involving animal testing is mandatory within the EU and other countries. However, the evaluation process has been subject to criticism, e.g., that the committees are not balanced or democratic enough and that the utilitarian weighting of harm and benefit that is normally prescribed is difficult to carry out in practice. In this study, members of Swedish Animal Ethics Committees (AECs) completed a survey aiming to further investigate the decision-making process. We found that researchers and animal laypersons make significantly different ethical judgments, and hold disparate views on which ethical aspects are the most relevant. Researchers were significantly more content than laypersons with the functioning of the committees, indicating that the ethical model used suited their preferences better. We argue that in order to secure a democratic and proper ethical evaluation, the expectations of a scientific discourse must be acknowledged, while giving room for different viewpoints. Further, to fulfil the purpose of the project evaluations and meet public concern, the functions of the different AEC member categories need to be clarified. We suggest that one way of achieving a more thorough, balanced and inclusive ethical evaluation is to allow for more than one model of ethical reasoning.

Defence date: 22 November 2013 ; This thesis is a collection of three essays on voting as a means of collective decision- making. The first chapter builds a model of how voters should optimally behave in a legislative election with three parties under plurality rule. I show that, in contrast to single district elections, properties such as polarisation and misaligned voting can be mitigated in legislative elections. The second chapter studies a model of committee decision making where members have career concerns and a principal can choose the level of transparency (how much of the committees decision he can observe). We show that increased transparency leads to a breakdown in information aggregation, but that this may actually increase the principal's payoff. The theoretical model is then tested in a laboratory experiment. The final chapter introduces a model of legislative bargaining where three parties in the legislature bargain over the formation of government by choosing a policy and a distribution of government perks. I show that when individual politicians are responsible for the policies they implement - that is, those outside of government are not held accountable by voters for the implemented governments policies, while each individual politician in the ruling coalition is - then a given seat distribution can result in almost any two party coalition. ; -- Voting in legislative elections under plurality rule -- How transparency kills information aggregation (and why that may be good) -- Legislative bargaining with accountability

We investigate the implications for the setting of interest rateswhen monetary policy decisions are taken by a committee, in whicha subset of members may meet prior to the voting in the committeeand therefore has the possibility to reach consensus ex ante to voteunanimously ex post. We allow for different committee sizes, variousvoting rules and differences in skills among committee members. Wefind that the size of the committee is much less important in deter-mining the degree of interest rate inertia than the skills of committeemembers. Moreover, prior interaction of a subgroup only has a minoreffect on the setting of interest rates by the committee, provided thatmembers on average are equally skilled and voting takes place using asimple majority rule. If either of those assumptions are relaxed, priorinteraction has substantial effects on the setting of interest rates. Inaddition, prior interaction increases the optimal size of the Committee,ceteris paribus.

The conciliation committee is the ultimate inter-cameral dispute settlement mechanism of the ordinary (former codecision) legislative procedure of the European Union. Who gets what, and why, in this committee? Are the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers on an equal footing? Upon a closer examination, the institutional set-up of the committee is bias in favour of the Council. The present research investigates under which conditions the European Parliament may be more successful in conciliation bargaining, by three integrating analyses. First, through Wordfish I conduct quantitative text analysis estimating the similarity between the documents of almost all the dossiers that reached conciliation up to February 2012. This evidence suggests that, in almost seventy per cent of times, the final agreement is more similar to the position of the Council. As expected, the Parliament has been more successful after the reform of the Treaty of Amsterdam and in dossiers where the Council decides by qualified majority voting. The Parliament also benefits if the rapporteur comes from a large party because a veto threat is more easily executable. In line with König et al. (2007), the support from the Commission as well as when national administrations are more involved in implementation than the Commission are crucial to parliamentary success. Second, a qualitative expert survey provides an in-depth contribution to the variables affecting legislative outcome for a broad array of cases. The discussions engaged key actors, both from the Council and Parliament, about several dossiers reached the conciliation. The qualitative analysis motivates some of the hypotheses confirmed by the quantitative empirical tests. It investigates the causal mechanism of the rapporteur's party affiliation, the membership length of the Council president and the Commission's role, while the personality of the relays actors and the relationship of the assembly with the public opinion, which were not analysed quantitatively, are likely to exert constraints on parliamentarians in finding an agreement or raising the disagreement value they attach to dossiers. Finally, after developing a formal model of conciliation under incomplete information, I select the case of the Telecom Package as analytic narrative to explain how Parliament may extract more concessions from the member states if it manipulates the Council's believe on its own type.

peer-reviewed ; This research is about the Committee of the Regions advisory role and the influence of its Opinion in the EU's decision-making process, particularly in the co-decision procedure. For this purpose, this study attempts to answer two research questions. The first one refers to the potential of the CoR to influence the legislative institutions considering its position in the EU's interinstitutional framework. In this part, what is of interest is the development of the CoR's formal and informal relations with the EU's institutions and the implications for its advisory role. The second research question refers to how and under which conditions the CoR influences the outcome of the co-decision procedure. To answer this part of the research a quantitative analysis is provided as an attempt to measure the impact of the amendments proposed by the CoR in its Opinions under co-decision and to examine possible explanations for its varying degree of influence. The results of this research show, that the CoR holds an important position within the EU's institutional setting. The CoR exploits this position by developing strong relations especially with the Commission and the European Parliament. The relationship of the CoR with the Commission has been formalised since the mid-1990s in the adoption of cooperation agreements. In these cooperation agreements, the Commission provides for more avenues for the CoR to participate in the decision-making process by requesting for its Opinion in instances where it is not required by the Treaty. Likewise, since 2014 the EP has formalised its relationship with the CoR with their own cooperation agreement with the CoR. The outcome of the quantitative analysis confirms, that the CoR has limited influence through its formal Opinion under co-decision. However, the CoR's advisory role should not be neglected completely, as the explanatory analysis shows that the CoR can influence the co-decision procedure when it issues its Opinion early in the decision-making process and in ...

The following paper proposes an analysis of the debates made by the members of the Economic Commissions of the Congress of Colombia on the General Government Budget from 2002 to 2009, to determine if the decisions on this have been taken with bounded rationality. The theoretical basis are the approaches to decision making made by Lindblom (1959), who assumes the concept of bounded rationality of the agents proposed by Simon (1957). The information of the sessions is analyzed through a model where debate, as a dependent variable, is explained with covariates related to the characteristics of the members of the parliament. Based on a longitudinal statistical model with informative drop-out and time-dependent covariates, the found factors associated to the debate allowed us to conclude that the decisions were not taken with any absolute technical rationality. ; El presente artículo propone un análisis de los debates hechos por los miembros de las Comisiones Económicas del Congreso de Colombia, sobre el Presupuesto General de la Nación de 2002 a 2009, para determinar si las decisiones sobre este han sido tomadas con racionalidad acotada. La base teórica son los planteamientos sobre la toma de decisiones realizados por Lindblom (1959), quien asume el concepto de racionalidad acotada de los agentes propuesto por Simon (1957). La información de las sesiones se analiza con un modelo donde el debate, como variable dependiente, es explicado con covariables relacionadas a las características de los parlamentarios. Con base en un modelo estadístico longitudinal con retiros informativos y covariables dependientes en el tiempo, encontramos factores asociados al debate que nos permiten concluir que las decisiones no fueron tomadas con absoluta racionalidad técnica.

The paper assesses the communication strategies of the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank and their effectiveness. We find that the effectiveness of communication is not independent from the decisionmaking process in the committee. The paper shows that the Federal Reserve has been pursuing a rather individualistic communication strategy amid a collegial approach to decision-making, while the Bank of England is using a collegial communication strategy and highly individualistic decision-making. The ECB has chosen a collegial approach both in its communication and in its decisionmaking. Assessing these strategies, we find that predictability of policy decisions and the responsiveness of financial markets to communication are equally good for the Federal Reserve and the ECB. This suggests that there may not be a single best approach to designing a central bank communication and decisionmaking strategy.

The exercise of conscience can have far reaching effects. Poor behaviour can be fatal, as it has occurred in various medical scandals over the years. This article takes a wide definition of conscience as its starting point, and argues that the decision-making processes open to society--legal regulation and professional regulation--can serve to limit the options available to an individual and thus her ability to exercise her conscience. The article charts the law's changing attitude to legal intervention, which now seeks to limit the use of conscience by individuals, and addresses concerns that this may serve to 'de-moralise' medicine. It also examines the reasons for this legal change of approach. ; Peer-reviewed ; Post-print