This discussion paper led to a publication in the 'Journal of Law, Economics & Organization', 2004, 20, 353-378.<P> This paper is concerned with the role of committees in collective decision-makingprocesses in a world where agents must be motivated to collect information. Committees improvethe...</p>

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...

In models of sequential decision making herd behaviour occurs if the signals smart(dumb) agents receive are (un)correlated and if agents have reputational concerns. We show thatintroducing costly effort to become informed about project payoffs (i) eliminates herdbehaviour and (ii) shifts...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the <A href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jems.12037/abstract">Journal of Economics & Management Strategy</A>. Organization differ in the degree to which they differentiate employees by ability. We analyse how the effect of differentiation on employee morale may explain this variation. By comparing...</a>

This paper offers a new theory of discrimination in the workplace. We consider a manager who has to assign two tasks to two employees. The manager has superior information about the employees' abilities. We show that besides an equilibrium where the manager does not discriminate, equilibria...

This discussion paper led to a publication in 'Social Choice and Welfare', 2006, 26, 527-545.<P> 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...</p>

A committee makes a decision on a project on behalf of "the public." Members of the committee agree on the a priori value of the project, and hold additional private information about its consequences. They are experts who care about the value of the project and about being considered well...

Several economists have directed our attention to a finding in the social psychological literature that extrinsic motivation may undermine intrinsic motivation. The self-perception (SP) theory developed by Bem (1972) explains this finding. The crux of this theory is that people remember their...

The collection of information necessary fordecision-making is often delegated to agents (e.g. bureaucrats,advisors, lawyers). If both the pros and cons of a decision haveto be examined, it is better to use competing agents instead of asingle agent. The reason is that two conflicting pieces...

We develop a simple model that describes individuals’ self-assessments oftheir abilities. We assume that individuals learn about their abilities from appraisalsof others and experience. Our model predicts that if communicationis imperfect, then (i) appraisals of others tend to be too positive,...