Printed in Great Britain COMMITTEES, HIERARCHIES AND POLYARCHIES

This dangerous fallacy I shall now illumine: To committees, nothing alien is human. Ogden Nash Committees represent a widespread form of modern decision making. This is because ' to err is human': on questions of importance, we are often reluctant to delegate the decision making authority to any single individual. There is an implicit belief that the wisdom ofa committee might be greater than that of any single member, that collective decision making avoids some of the worst errors that might otherwise occur. But at the same time, some ofthe negative features of committees (for instance, the manhours devoted to decision making, or the delays in getting agreements) are also well known. In this paper we study the decision making of committees and contrast this to the decision making of certain stylised forms of centralised versus decentralised organisations (which we respectively call hierarchies and polyarchies). Our analysis focuses on two economic trade-offs involved i