Deliberation, Leadership and Information Aggregation

We analyze a committee of voters who take a decision via a two‐stage process. In a discussion stage, voters share non‐verifiable information about a private signal concerning what is the best decision. In a voting stage, a decision is taken by voting. We introduce the possibility of leadership whereby a certain voter, the leader, is more influential than the rest at the discussion stage even though she is not better informed. We study the effects of leadership on information transmission and the quality of the choice made by the committee, and how these effects depend on the specific voting rule employed. We find that how truthful voters are at the discussion stage depends non‐monotonically on how influential the leader is. Moreover, when the leader's influence is relatively high, supermajority voting rules may increase the probability of choosing the best option when compared with the majority voting rule.