This paper studies a committee decision-making problem. Committee members are heterogeneous in two private dimensions: their competence about what the correct alternative is, and their bias. Furthermore, they are career oriented and they can abstain. The interaction between career concern and bias affects the voting behavior of members depending on transparency of individual votes. We show that transparency attenuates the pre-existing biases of competent members and exacerbates the biases of incompetent members. Public voting leads to better
decisions when the magnitude of the bias is large, while secret voting performs better otherwise. We provide experimental evidence supporting our theoretical conclusions.
Relatore: Andrea Mattozzi