Delegation or Voting

Collective decision procedures should balance the incentives they provide to acquire information and their capacity to aggregate private information. In a decision problem in which a project can be accepted or rejected once information about its quality has been acquired or not, we compare the per-formance of a delegation structure with that of two voting procedures. Dele-gation makes one’s acceptance decision pivotal by definition. The decisiveness of one’s vote in a voting procedure depends on the other agent’s vote. This in turn determines the decision to acquire information. In the debate about a rational choice foundation of Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, the distribution of information was left exogenous. Mixed (acceptance) strategies were required to validate the Theorem. Endogenizing information acquisition as we do re-veals mixed (acceptance) strategies to be detrimental for welfare as they lead to indifference between buying and not buying information