Public versus Secret Voting in Committees Andrea Matozzi

This paper studies both theoretically and experimentally a committee decision-making problem. Committee members are career oriented, they care about taking the right decision and may be biased towards one of the alternatives. We investigate how the interaction between career concerns and bias a↵ects the behavior of members and how this e↵ect depends on transparency of individual votes. We show that while transparency attenuates the pre-existing biases of competent members, it may actually exacerbate the biases of incompetent members, leading them to vote more in accordance with their private interests. As a result, public voting leads to better decisions when the magnitude of the bias is large relative to the common value, while secret voting performs better otherwise. We provide experimental evidence supporting our theoretical conclusions.