We show that in an environment of incomplete information, if individual preferences are sufficiently rich, then monotonicity and the Pareto property applied only when there is common knowledge of Pareto dominance imply (i) there must exist a common prior over the smallest common knowledge event and (ii) aggregation must be ex-ante utilitarian with respect to that common prior. This work builds ...

This paper proposes tests to empirically examine whether auction prices aggregate information away from the limit. These tests are based on 1) a combination of comparative statics with respect to the number of bidders and the dispersion of information signals and 2) comparison of actual prices to predicted Nash equilibrium prices based on observed auction parameters. When applied to eBay online...

Drawing upon recent results on bandwagons in sequential voting, and by deriving analogous results for simultaneous voting, I compare the information aggregation properties of the two processes. The conclusions con...rm commonly held views about the front-loading of presidential primaries: that in tight races a simultaneous vote is preferred as it is more likely to lead to the selection of the “...

We study a model of collective decision making in which divergent preferences of the agents make information aggregation impossible in a single round of voting. With costly delay, we show that repeated voting can help the agents reach a mutually preferred decision, even though there is no new direct information about the decision between two rounds of voting. An increase in the cost of delay ca...

This paper examines how information is aggregated by a committee that has to decide when to end search. Each period, committee members observe private signals about the current alternatives, then vote whether to accept one of these alternatives or continue searching. In a pure common values setting, we extend the result of Austen-Smith and Banks (1996) to this dynamic environment: the only voti...

The flourishing of online labor markets such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) makes it easy to recruit many workers for solving small tasks. We study whether information elicitation and aggregation over a combinatorial space can be achieved by integrating small pieces of potentially imprecise information, gathered from a large number of workers through simple, one-shot interactions in an onlin...

We study information aggregation with a biased election organizer who recruits voters at some cost. Voters are symmetric ex-ante and prefer policy a in state A and policy b in state B, but the organizer prefers policy a regardless of the state. Each recruited voter observes a private signal that is imperfectly informative about the unknown state, but does not learn the size of the electorate. I...

We start with the simplest possible model. There are kn objects for sale and n potential buyers. The valuations vi are drawn independently from a common distribution F (vi) for all potential bidders. We assume that F has a continuous density function f . Suppose now that the objects are allocated according to the following rule: kn buyers with the highest bids receive the object and pay the pri...

We start with the simplest possible model. There are kn objects for sale and n potential buyers. The valuations vi are drawn independently from a common distribution F (vi) for all potential bidders. We assume that F has a continuous density function f . Suppose now that the objects are allocated according to the following rule: kn buyers with the highest bids receive the object and pay the pri...

This paper investigates a common criticism of competitive elections: Candidates pander to voters and choose the most popular platform, regardless of it being optimal for the voters. I study an election with two perfectly informed candidates. Voters share common values over the policy outcome of the election, but possess arbitrarily little information about which policy is best for them. Voters ...