Non-Congruent Views about Signal Precision in Collective Decisions

Abstract

We relax the standard assumptions in collective decision-making models that voters can not only derive a perfect view about the accuracy of the information at their disposal before casting their votes, but can, in addition, also correctly assess other voters’ views about it. We assume that decision-makers hold potentially differing views, while remaining ignorant about such differences, if any. In this setting, we find that information aggregation works well with voting rules other than simple majority: as voters vote less often against their information than in conventional models, they can deliver higher-quality decisions, including in the canonical 12 jurors case. We obtain voting equilibria with many instances, in which other voting rules, including unanimity, clearly outperform simple majority.