We provide an explanation for why committees may behave over-cautiously. A committee of experts makes a decision on a … aggregation fails in large committees: under any majority rule, the committee rejects the innovation almost surely. …

standard voting model, we show that information is aggregated in large committees provided disesteem payoffs are not overly … disesteem payoff if he/she voted in favor of an ill-fated innovation. An example is FDA committees, where committee members can …, information aggregation fails in large committees and the committee rejects the innovation almost surely, providing an explanation …

information aggregation. Despite this, unanimity is frequently used in committees making decisions on behalf of society. This … rationale for the widespread use of unanimous voting. …

conflicting interests. We show that the set of preferences that allow for the existence of an informative voting equilibrium can … voting threshold value. What's worse, the presence of the public information introduces an inefficient equilibrium which … robustly exists across different voting rules. To mitigate the harmful effect of the public information, we propose to use a …

private information truthfully before voting takes place. Depending on the distance between two feasible public good levels …, the optimal mechanism involves either one or two voting rounds. We show that procedural efficiency cannot be achieved by … communication among all citizens prior to voting. Finally, we outline several applications of the mechanism. …