Information transfer and aggregation in an uninformed committee: A model for the selection and use of biased expert advice

- Laboratory experiments study to asymmetric information in voting committees.
- A dyadic process is designed for using self-interested informed experts.
- Competition forces experts to reveal information in spite of unverified cheap talk.
- Majority rule committee decisions under uncertainty converge to informed equilibria.

A committee of five uses majority rule for decisions on two public goods. Individual committee member preferences depend on a state of nature that is unknown to the committee members but the state of nature is known to two experts who have preferences about committee decisions. Experts have no vote on the committee but provide a recommendation to the committee at the opening of a meeting. Two experts who have known, opposing biases are selected - a dyadic mechanism. The results reveal that experts do not tell the truth but committee decisions are as if committee members know what the experts know. The information transfer occurs because committee members anticipate the biases and properly infer the information held by the experts.