The goal of this paper is to illustrate the significance of information acquisition in mechanism design. We provide a stark example of a mechanism design problem in a collective choice environment with information acquisition. We concentrate on committees that are comprised of agents sharing a...

Conflicts of interest arise between a decision maker and agents who have information pertinent to the problem because of differences in their preferences over outcomes. We investigate how the decision maker can extract the information by distorting the decisions that will be taken. We show that...