Delay in Strategic Information Aggregation

Abstract. We study a model of collective decision making in which agents vote on the decision repeatedly until they agree, with the agents receiving no exogenous new informa-tion between two voting rounds but incurring a delay cost. Although preference conflict between the agents makes information aggregation impossible in a single round of voting, in the equilibrium of the repeated voting game agents are increasingly more willing to vote their private information after each disagreement. Information is efficiently aggregated within a finite number of rounds. As delay becomes less costly, agents are less willing to vote their private information, and efficient information aggregation takes longer. Even as the delay cost converges to zero, agents are strictly better off in the repeated voting game than in any single round game for moderate degrees of initial conflict. * Li and Suen thank the Guanghua School of Management of Peking University, an