Strategic Expert Committees and the Markets That Assess Them: A Laboratory Experiment
通过实验室实验研究专家委员会的决策与评估者对其能力评估之间的关系，比较观察到的行为与理论预测，发现评估者基于委员会决策和声明做出的评估更理性，而委员会对提高预期收益的利用不如理论预测充分。
Committees of experts are widely used to make decisions. We experimentally investigate the relationship between decision making in committees and the assessment of the ability of committee members by evaluators, comparing observed behavior with theoretical predictions. Treatments vary in whether members care only about a state-dependent project payoff or also about assessments and whether evaluators can base their assessments only on the decision the committee makes or also on cheap-talk statements made by committee members on their confidence in the committee decision. Evidence for the equilibrium predictions is mixed; for example, contrary to theory, committees with a concern for their assessment do not distort their decisions more than committees without, whereas in line with theory, evaluators give higher assessments to committees that take the risky decision rather than the riskless. We analyze whether evaluators rationally base their assessments on observed behavior of committees using an orthogonality test. In treatments with cheap-talk statements, assessments are quite rational; in treatments without, they are too low on average. We investigate whether committees best reply to expected project payoffs and, in treatments in which members’ payoffs also depend on assessments, to predicted assessments conditional on observed committee behavior. In all treatments, committees respond to the possibilities to raise expected payoffs but do not use them as much as predicted by theory. We conclude by showing that the amount of information about committee members’ abilities that ends up in assessments is considerably larger when evaluators observe committees’ decisions and statements rather than only decisions. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) under the grant 400-09-338; and Erasmus University Rotterdam [Grant CSTO 2014–54]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.03007 .