Standing versus Ad Hoc Committees with Costly Information Acquisition

We experimentally study compulsory majority voting over two alternatives in small committees. The committee members share a common interest, and each member decides on whether to buy a private signal about which alternative better suits their interest. A signal is valuable but only imperfectly indicates the better alternative. In the experiment, both standing and ad hoc committees perform on average poorly, but the former committees do even worse and have a much higher performance variation than the latter ones. We attribute the low efficiency to limited feedback about the informational efforts of co‐members, which impedes coordination and proper evaluation of their intention to cooperate