Collective decision procedures should balance the incentives they provide toacquire information and their capacity to aggregate private information. In a decisionproblem in which a project can be accepted or rejected once information about its qualityhas been acquired or not, we compare the...

We study a model of collective decision making with endogenous information collection.Agents collect information about the consequences of a project, communicate, and then vote onthe project. We examine under what conditions communication may increase the probability thatgood decisions are made....

We identify the conditions under which voters can induce political parties to collect information and to select policies which are optimal from the representative voter’s point of view. We show that when parties are office motivated the voting rule should encourage parties to collect...

After decades of government growth, Western countries have witnessed major policy reversals. Prominent examples include the far-reaching policy reversals implemented by Thatcher, Reagan, and Douglas. This paper offers an explanation for these policy reversals. Our key argument rests on the...

We study a model of collective decision making with endogenous information collection. Agents collect information about the consequences of a project, communicate, and then vote on the project. We examine under what conditions communication may increase the probability that good decisions are...

We identify the conditions under which voters can induce political parties to collect information and to select policies which are optimal from the representative voter's point of view. We show that when parties are office motivated the voting rule should encourage parties to collect...